Turn Your 3D Printer into a Business: From Hobby to Profit

1. Intro: What's going on, Skillshare? My name is Zach Hardley and welcome to my three D printing business. I currently have over 73 D printers, and I'm doing just over $1,000,000 in sales per year. In this course, I'm going to give you the fast track, the cheek code, and the shortcuts to skip through all of the painful lessons and the trials and tribulations that I have learned along the way. I'm going to teach you how to design your first product. I'm going to teach you how to launch your first website. And I'm going to teach you how to not only bring in your first sale, but how to build the infrastructure to bring in continuous sales on a daily basis and fulfill them with happy customers. But for more details on that, let's head up to the office. All right. Welcome to the office. This is probably where most of the videos are going to take place as I walk you through the different concepts and lessons. And the first place that I want to start right now is what you are going to need for this course. Number one is that you're going to need a three D printer. You don't need it right away. You don't need it before you start the course. You can take the course and see if you like it. But at some point in order to get the full value out of the course, you are going to need a three D printer. Luckily, they cost as little as $200 right now on Amazon and from some of the suppliers. So not a huge expense, especially when you consider what the possibilities are and what you can get out of this. It's really an amazing investment and it's something that you can use for so many different reasons. After that, you are going to need a computer. We're going to be editing some files, we're hopefully going to be editing some videos at some point and designing some products. Having a computer is definitely going to be an asset here. You will also need a camera. You can use your phone camera. You can go out and buy a camera. You can use your friend's camera. You can rent a camera. There's tons of different ways to do it, but you're going to need to take some product photos so you do need a camera. Lastly, there are a couple softwares that I use that will make your life easier. There are free alternatives that you don't have to pay for, but the softwares that I use are a little bit better, but you do have to pay for them. It's a trade off. You got different options there. But these are the four things that you are going to need throughout this course. Now, who is this course for? Number one, this is for anybody that is looking for a new career or a new income source. If you are somebody that is trying to explore what the options are out there, this is something that you can test out, you can try out in a couple of hours and you can see if it is right for you. Number two, if you're an ambitious entrepreneur, this is probably one of the most pure forms of entrepreneurship that you will find. You are creating the product, you're creating the branding, you're creating the marketing, you're creating the distribution. You might even be manufacturing the product yourself with your three D printer. This business model is quite literally the most pure embodiment of entrepreneurship that I can possibly think of. That's why I'm so passionate about it and that's why I'm so excited about it. That's why I think it's so amazing. Lastly, if you're just somebody that is already interested in three D printing or you have a three D printer and you might want to turn it into a small business or a side hustle, this is going to be the perfect stepping stone you to get started. And so next one up here is my content. If you're interested in seeing my background, doing some research on me beforehand, seeing what my content looks like outside of Skillshare, definitely check me out on any of the social media platforms. I have a personal brand under Zack Hartley, and I post all of my three D printing content under Hartley Printing, basically on all of the platforms. And then the software that I use for three D printing is called printq.ca. So you can check all of my links basically by using my first or last name, you should be able to find it pretty easily. And if you go through Skillshare on my profile, you will be able to book a one on one call. So if you have any questions or you want more mentorship or tutoring or help with anything you're doing, that is available through my profile on Skillshare, and that is it for this video. I hope you are excited about this. I hope you're ambitious. I hope you have got high hopes for this, and I hope I can fulfill them. I put a lot of effort into this, so if you have any questions, comments, please let me know. Please leave a review, please comment on the video. I'm going to do my best to respond to you and this could be a new chapter for you and I'm just happy that I get to share it with you and I'm happy that I get to share this with the world. Thank you for joining. Thank you for starting. Let's get into. 2. Course Project: Alright everybody, welcome to the second video in this course. This one is going to be really quick because all we're going to talk about here is the course project. Now, Skillshare has a section probably on the right hand side, or if you're on your mobile device at the bottom, where you can submit a project. And here are the steps in order to do that. Number one, click on submit a project. Number two, the brand that you were going to come up with throughout this course or the product or the company that you're going to create. Use that as the title of your project. And then, number three, put your domain name or the website of your project or of your business. In the description of your project because that's where we're going to be able to click on it. And if you can share any links to your social media or some info about how you are actually going to drive traffic to your website, please share that in there. Now, I know that sounds kind of strange, but I'm going to teach you how to do all of that in the upcoming videos. The project is just somewhere that you can share what you have built with what you have learned in the course. And I sincerely appreciate it. Skillshare thinks it's really cool. And if you share your website on I'm going to go check it out, and I'm going to try and buy something. And so it is also your way to get your first customers. So definitely check it out. Please consider it. And it's just a way to show what you have built with what you have learned in the course. And it also gives me a way to kind of adjust my teaching and get better over time because if we are missing something, I want to add it into the course so that everybody gets it moving forward and so that hopefully we can share those lessons with everybody from the past, as well. So it's a way to share your work. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. Let's get on with the show. 3. Choosing a 3D Printer: All right, everybody, welcome back. In this video, we're going to start talking about how to choose the right printer for you, and we're going to talk about the four different factors that you need to consider. The first factor here is the size of the print bed. The second factor is the materials that you want to print with. The third factor is the brand of printer, and the fourth factor is going to be the cost, and now we're going to dive into each of those factors to give you some context. Number one, the first thing that I want to talk about is the bed size. This is what is going to determine what you can actually print in a single piece. What I mean by that is, let's say you have a very large piece that you want to print, and it's larger than the actual print bed of your printer. Well, you have a couple of different options. You can split it into a couple of pieces. You can redesign it. You can change it. You can alter but at the end of the day, you're not going to be able to print it in a single piece on your printer because that part is larger than the actual print bed. And so if you are going to buy a printer and you're going to make parts that are medium or large size, you want to make sure that you have a printer that can accommodate that size. For instance, here is a small and a large sized printer. This is the bamboo labs A one Mini. This is basically one of the cheapest printers of good quality that you can buy on the market. It's two h or $300, and it will only print 180 by 180 cube. That is basically the size that you can get out of this printer. A larger size printer is called the Prusa l. It's a couple thousand dollars. It actually has five different printheads on it, and it will print 360 millimeters by 360 millimeters. So quite literally twice the diameter, twice the width, twice the volume, it's super twice the height. And I think it's four, eight times the volume. And so there is a significant difference between what you can print on the bamboo lab's A one mini versus what you can print on the Prusa l in a single piece. And you need to keep that in mind because ideally you want to print everything in a single piece because it's going to make your life much easier most of the time. Now, on average, what you will find is that most three D printers are somewhere in that 200 by 200 millimeter range. So for instance, the Prusa Mark four and the Mark four S are the printer that I use. They currently have a bed width diameter or length of 210 millimeters by 250 millimeters. Another super popular printer for what I do in the print farm world is the p1p, I believe it is, and it has a print bed of 256 by 256 millimeters. And so I would say that these two printers here are in that medium category. The A one mini and the Prusa mini are on the small side, and then the Prusa Excel and maybe the Orange Storm Giga are the larger or Excel versions of the three D printers that are available to you. What I would do if I were you is I would try and start with the medium size unless you know right away that you're going to need something that is larger than 256 by 256 by 256. Now the second thing that you need to consider here is the printing materials. There's two sides of this. Number one is what material you want to print with, and then number two is the color. When it comes to what material you are going to print with, there are some materials that require a heated chamber, meaning that they require the air around that print to be warmer than ambient so that it can print at a higher and better quality, and it can cool down slower over time to prevent any cracking or warping. That is why we heat up some of the chambers, and I'll show you what those printers look. But those materials are usually specialized for high strength or durability or heat resistance, anything along those lines. And so if you are trying to print anything or you know that your product is going to require some type of specialized material beyond basically just traditional plastic, then you may want to consider buying a printer with a heated chamber and one that can take a specialized nozzle. For instance, the Prusa core one is a brand new printer that just came out with a heated chamber, and the bamboo labs XYC is a printer that's been out for a little while and has had great results, and a lot of people love them. And these are two options that I would probably consider if I knew that I was going to be printing in specialized materials and I needed something that was going to give me a super strong product or a super durable product or a super heat resistant product, I would focus my attention on a printer that has that capability. Now, the other side of it that you're going to really want to consider here and that's becoming definitely more popular over time is three D printing with multiple different colors. Or materials at the same time. And so the idea here is that you're going to load up several different rolls of filament, whether they're different colors or different materials, and then you are going to three D print it, and that printer is going to change out the different materials so that you end up with a finished product that is multi color or molting material and looks the way you want it to. And so if you are looking for a printer that has that capability of printing with multiple materials or multiple colors at the same time right away, my personal advice to you is to probably go with the bamboo labs printer because I have the Prusa printers. I have 70 of them, and I have the setup for multiple colors, and I like the bamboo lab setup better. It's just a cleaner system. It's more organized. It takes up less space. It seems more efficient in general, for the user, at least, maybe not for filament, but in general, that is how I feel about printing with multiple materials and multiple colors. You're probably better off going with a bamboo labs printer or a Crealty printer or a different brand than Prusix. I'm not super happy with their solution to that system. Now, the third factor here that we need to consider is the brand. Remember back in the day when you probably saw Apple and Microsoft computers, and it basically showed you that one of them was closed and one of them was open, meaning that Microsoft, you could go in, you can write software, you can change things up, and you can upgrade the memory. You can do things along those lines. And Apple is kind of a closed system where you can't get into your hardware. You can't just upgrade and change out the SD card and get an extra hundred gigs of storage. You can't just upgrade the operating system or change the operating system, things along those lines. And so when we think about that concept, it's actually the exact same thing in the three D printing world. Prusa is the open source kind of company that has helped give away their software and help other people build upon it and help build a community, and you can change and you can access, and you can customize and you can replace parts. And they're a very fluid system. And so PrusSA builds printers with an open system focus, and because of that, they also want you to be able to upgrade between printers. So for instance, if you have an old Prusa printer, you can buy an upgrade kit and it'll basically give you all the upgrades to bring it up to speed with the latest three D printer. Bamboo labs is pretty much the opposite. They are a closed system where it's a little bit harder to make changes. It's a little bit harder to customize. It's a little bit harder to swap parts. And they currently do not have a path for you to upgrade from printer to printer as the technology gets better. And so you need to kind of understand that and ask yourself if it's important for you because for me, I am running a print farm with 73 D printers, and I don't want to have to replace those printers every three years. I'd much rather buy a couple hundred dollar upgrade kit and make them modern and give them all those extra features that the latest technology now has. So for me, that is super important. But if you're doing something smaller and you're doing prototyping or you're doing smaller production, maybe that doesn't even matter. There's other companies out there that have a bit of a mixed approach. Crealty is a brand that I would say has a bit of a mixed approach sort of in between Prusa and bamboo labs. Now, the fourth factor and obviously one of the most important here is the cost. And what I would really say to you is that you need to ask yourself what you plan on doing with this three D printer, because if you're just testing this out and you want to see if it works and see if it's something you're interested in, and just see what three D printing is like, then I would say, go out and buy the cheapest printer, go out and buy the bamboo labs A one or the A one mini because it'll give you good quality and it'll show you exactly what this whole industry is all about. You'll be able to do 90% of everything you ever want to do. However, if you're planning to get into this and you want to do specialty materials and you want to really push the boundaries, and you want the latest tech, and you want to be able to do absolutely everything, then I would say, maybe it's time to buy the expensive printer, like the Puss at core one or the bamboo labs XYC or whatever they come out with next because then it's really going to matter that you have those capabilities, even though you're not going to use it all the time, you want to be able to have access to it, and you don't need to buy ten printers, so maybe the expensive printer purchase one time is actually worth it. Now, for me, I run a print farm where, for me, the most important things are reliability and the ability to upgrade that printer and things along those lines. And so if you were running a print farm, what I would do is I would try and do some research and figure out what printer you think is going to be the most reliable over time for what you are printing. For me, so far, that has been the Prusa printers. I've seen other people that are printing similar things, though, that say bamboo has been great for them. I've seen other people that say Creality is. Honestly, at the end of the day, it's a little bit tough to tell. Prusa, as far as I can tell, though, had the best track record, the longest history. And they also make it super, super easy to swap out the parts. So I like their system. That's why I chose it for my print farm, but a lot of people are going with bamboo for their print farm, and there is nothing wrong with that. I think it's a great choice, as well. Here are my final thoughts. Number one, you need to choose the right printer for you, and that will depend on your own situation and what you want to do with it. What is your end goal what is your financial situation look like? What do you actually want to print with this printer? That's what's going to determine which one's going to be best for you. The SLS printing is also another alternative. So all we've talked about here is FDM printing, where filament is going into the printer and it is coming out and that print head is basically moving in a certain shape to create a product. SLS printing is where you are pouring resin into a vat and using a laser from underneath to harden certain areas of it, and as it moves up, it builds your product. It is a little bit more labor intensive and complicated process, which is why for this, we are going to be focused on the current type of printing that I've been talking about. The last thing I want to talk about is that the print quality is very similar between all printers. I've had a bamboo labs A one mini. I've had the latest generation printers. And what I will tell you is that the difference in the actual finished quality of the product is not very large. There's a little bit of human control over that, and you can get most of these printers to print very, very well to the point that the average untrained eye wouldn't notice any defects. The difference in the printers is their capabilities of what they can print, how quickly they can print it. Can they print specialized materials? And what does the actual software, hardware and ecosystem look like around it? That is the actual difference in these printers. It's not necessarily the actual quality of the print that is coming out of it. So that is something that you should really keep in mind here. Me, my personal setup right now as I am filming, I have 70 printers in total. They're all of the Prusa brand at the moment. I sold my bamboo labs printers. I do have both Kur and K S printers, but I am in the process of upgrading them all to MK Sprinters. And my focus at My farm is on reliability and the ability to upgrade the printers, which is why PRUSA made the right was the right decision for me at the time. For you, things might be differently. Technology is also going to evolve. So depending on when you watch this video, trends may change. There's going to be updates to these printer models, I'm sure in the next few months here. So keep that in mind. Take this video and apply the principles of what I have talked about and then do your own research to see what is the latest printer model and technology that's available for when you're watching this video. I hope this helps, and we'll see you in the next video. 4. Tinkercad design: Alright, everybody, welcome back to another video. In this one, I am going to walk you through how to design on Tinkercad. The reason that we are going to use Tinkercad is because it's super user friendly. It's easy to learn. You can design things very, very quickly, and it's a very low barrier to entry. So this is kind of like the first step in learning how to professionally design products, and it's just a really nice entry point, especially because it allows you to get three D printing and create lot faster than if you had to basically go out and learn how to use auto fusion or any of these complex software. So first thing you need to do is go to tinkercad.com. You need to create an account. It's going to take you to a home page. You're probably not going to have any designs in it, but that's okay. We're going to go to the top right corner here and we're going to click on Create. We are then going to create a three D design. You also have options for circuits and code blocks, but for us, we are going to focus on three D design. So then going to open up basically a blank canvas here. This is a giant square that allows us to design whatever we want. Now, your square might be a little bit different than this. It might be a little bit smaller or larger. You can go into the settings and you can adjust that. Mine is probably a little bit larger than what you might be looking at when you first get in there, but you can go to the settings right here and you can adjust it. You are probably at 100 so let's just adjust this so they look the same. And then we'll go like that. We'll go close settings, and then we can zoom in here, and this is what we have to work with. Now, when it comes to design on Tinkercad, basically what happens is we use very, very simple shapes, and we try and combine those shapes in order to make the product that we're looking for. So for instance, on the right hand side here, you can see that I'm in the category of basic shapes. We want to stay in that category, and that's where we're probably going to do most of our work. The first shape on the right here is a box. I believe this box is going to be 20 by 20 by 20 on all three dimensions. And you can adjust these dimensions by clicking on the white squares or the black squares. The black squares will adjust just kind of like one dimension of it. The white squares will adjust a few dimensions of it. And then if you want to move it up or down, you use this arrow right here. You can also rotate it into whatever orientation you want. If you keep your mouse inside of the circle, it will kind of jump to the different angles here. And if you take it outside of the circle, you can sort of fine tune it. So we'll flip it upside down. And then we want to make sure it's back on the ground, so we want to make sure that the space between the ground and the product is zero. If we raise it up, we can see that it is now 8 millimeters and it's floating. It's not really a great way to design products. We're going to put this all the way onto the ground. And now we have a cube that we can adjust the different dimensions. So let's say that we want to make some adjustments to this cube. We like it, but the 90 degree angles aren't really great for printing and what we're looking for. We can go to the box here and we can put a radius on it, and we can round off some of those corners. We can increase the number of steps in those corners. So let's say you wanted it to almost look like a diamond, you could go that way. But if you wanted to add a bunch of steps, it would start to round it out and you can really kind of play with and adjust the shape just on these settings here. And then, again, obviously, you can adjust the length and width. And so that's how you can sort of customize the individual basic shapes that you'll see on the right hand side here. Next thing that we should talk about that you probably noticed here is that the first two shapes are a box and a cylinder here, but they're highlighted in gray. What that means is that there are going to be a hole or an empty void or a cavity. And so when we combine these two products here, and we say, Okay, I want to select both the hole that is the cylinder and the box that is this red rectangle here. And then I'm going to go to the top right corner and I'm going to click on this group button, or I can click on Control G, and what it's going to do is it's going to put those two shapes together. This is what I was referring earlier when I said, we're going to take basic shapes and we're going to put them together. Now you are going to have a rectangle with a hole in it as soon as you click on that button. Now, let's say that we needed to carve off part of the corner here because it's going to sit on an angle. Well, we can bring out the rectangle hole and we can rotate it by, let's just say 135 degrees, and we can chop off the corner here, and then we can combine those two products, and now we have adjusted the design again. Now, the other option that you're probably going to want to talk about is putting text onto the product. When you drag these products out, you can kind of apply it to the different surfaces. So if I let it go right on top of this red product here, it is going to sit that text right on top of that red product, and you can see that there's a gap there. Now, obviously, this is far too large, so I'm going to shrink it down. I'm going to put it right in the middle there, and I'm going to make sure that it's only 1 millimeter tall so that it just barely sticks out of the product. We're going to zoom in a little bit more. There we go. Now it's all set and ready to go. To zoom in and out, I'm scrolling on the mouse wheel right here, and now we can adjust the text. We can put Zach. We can put our name in there. Let's go. Z AC. We can also change the font of it. I usually go with Sands mono because it's a little easier to print. We can change the bevel on it and make it thicker or thinner, kind of like the bold level of you can change the segments on it. Honestly, I don't think this does a whole lot in this font, but you've got a little bit of ways that you can adjust it, and then you can also increase the size right here. So again, we're going to highlight all of those products, and we are going to combine them together with this grouping button right here. And now we have a product that's all set and ready to now, let's say that I wanted to have multiple of these products. Well, to kind of duplicate this is really simple. All we're going to do is we're going to go control C and then control V, and that's going to copy it and paste it. Now, let's say that I put it over here, and what I actually wanted to do was I wanted to line these two so that they're both in line with each other along this bottom axis here. Well, all I have to do to do that is I'm going to highlight both of them, and then I'm going to click on this align button right here, and it's going to give me a bunch of black dots that I'm going to be able to choose where I want to align this product. And so if I click on this bottom left one right here, it's going to align these products along this bottom edge. If I click on this one right here, it's going to actually align both products all the way along the left side, and now I've got both of them stacked on top of each other, which isn't a great situation. So we're going to go to the top left here and we're going to click on B, and now we've got it back to the way it was, and they're both perfectly aligned. Now, you've got a lot of different basic shapes here. You've also got a couple different other categories that you can play with. You've got hardware, electronics, fun and games, lots of different shapes in here, but some of them are not ideal for three D printing. So keep that in mind, keep in mind that your printer is putting down layer by layer, and so you need to just understand at some shapes and some angles are difficult for a three D printer or will require support. And if you can design without support, it reduces your labor, it reduces your costs. And most of the time it comes out with a nicer print. Now, let's say that you had a design that you wanted to import from somewhere else. So let's just change this. We are going to make it really small here, and we are going to save this as a file. We're going to click on Export, STL, and we are going to call this Rev one. So now we have one version of this. And if I wanted to go to my slicer, I could put that file in there, but we're going to delete this now. So let's say that this is our design and we wanted to import a file. We wanted to bring something in from Thing of verse or Maker world or printables, whatever it might be something we downloaded online or something we made at another time. What we're going to do here is we're going to click on the Import button. We're going to click on Choose a file. We're going to click on that exact file that we just exported, just because I needed an example here. We're going to click on Import, and now we can bring that file into our Tinkercad document, and we can actually work on it. The problem here, though, is that you're not going to be able to separate this into the different pieces. And so just keep that in mind when you're importing and exporting documents or importing and exporting objects, I should say. What I mean by that is with this product here, I can click on the ungroup button, and I can now pull this text. Or I can change the text, or I can make it larger or smaller. And if I click on the main piece again and I click this button again, it will basically ungroup it and show me the last piece that was grouped together. And if I do it again, I can get that basically cylindrical hole that we put there in the beginning. And if I wanted to, I could delete everything and I can take it the way it was originally. So with Tinkercad, all we are doing is we are adding and subtracting different shapes that we're either finding in Tinkercad or that we're finding in other places, importing them into Tinkercad, and then using them and customizing them until we get what we need or the product that we're trying to develop. Now, a couple last minute things that you may want to know and you may want to think about is all of these basically small cubes right here represent 1 millimeter. If you ever wanted to move your object by less than one full millimeter, you can adjust that. You can adjust it all the way down to 0.1 millimeter or you can turn it off to which point Tinkercad will move it the smallest increment possible to the point that you quite literally can barely see it move. And so you got lots of different options over there. You can also change a five millimeter increment so that you can move products very quickly, or if you copy and paste them, you can align them and copy and paste them again very quickly. Also, you have a lot of settings down here that you can control, such as the size of your bill plate like I showed you in the beginning. And if you ever wanted to basically invert or reverse any of your products, it's very simple. You click on the button right here, and then we'll give you all the different ways that you could reverse or invert that product until you get exactly what you're looking for. So if you need a left and a right shoe, this can be a great option for you and it can be a great tool. They're also adding new features here all the time, so make sure to check it out and stay updated. And I hope this video helps in your design. I I missed anything or if you have any questions, please let me know. You can also coordinate your view from the different angles right here with this tool on the left. Go to the home button here, you can zoom and zoom out with your mouse, and then you right as you can probably tell, the right click button is what's going to help you kind of turn the image around like this. So that's it. If I missed any features, leave a comment. Let me know what I missed. I will add it in a follow up video. This is how you use Tinkercad. Some of the next videos are going to talk about some of the design principles that we want to incorporate into these designs. 5. Design Principles: Alright, everybody, welcome back to another video. In this one, I'm going to walk you through a couple of design principles that you're going to want to be thinking about as you go through the process of creating your products. And so, without any further ado, let's just jump right into it. Here I am in Tinkercad. The first kind of principle that I want to talk to you about is avoiding supports. Supports for your three D printer are going to cost you labor because you're going to have to remove the supports. They're going to cost you material to make the supports, and they're going to cost you print time in order to print the supports. They are absolutely terrible. They're the worst thing about three D printing. And if you can avoid them in any possible way, you definitely should. As an example, the best and the easiest way to avoid supports is to change your orientation. So let's say we had a product that looks like this. We have a clear overhang right here that is going to require supports. In order to avoid printing supports, all we're going to do is change the orientation. If you can possibly change the orientation of your product in any way to avoid supports, you should do that 99% of the time. Now, let's say you have a product where it's really difficult to change the orientation, and that's not really a great solution for your application. Well, then you have another option here, and that is called adding a chamfer. A chamfer basically kind of eliminates this 90 degree overhang right here with a slow and gradual slope to the point where the overhang was required. And so, adding in a chamfer here basically eliminates the need for supports because your printer can print on a 45 degree angle, and this is enough of adhesion area on the first layer, it's going to hold the product in. And so if you cannot change the orientation to avoid adding supports, then you should try and add what's called a chamfer, which is basically this cutoff here. You're basically cutting off this 90 degree angle here at a 45 degree angle so that you can eliminate the need for supports. If you can't use either of those strategies, then supports may be required. But if you can apply either of those strategies, 99% of the time, it is going to be much better. Okay, now, the second principle that I want to talk about here is making your products round and bulky. The reason that we want to make your products round and bulky is because if your printer has a 90 degree corner, what's usually happening is that your printer is moving full speed to this corner and then it is stopping and then it is accelerating to full speed to the next point. The problem with that is that your printer is accelerating, stopping, and accelerating, which causes vibration. It causes print issues. It causes quality issues, and it slows down your print because instead of that print head, maintaining a consistent speed the entire time, it's basically coming to a stop and then re accelerating and if you can round your products from a square with 90 degree angles to a radius where the corners are much softer and more of a smooth, circular pattern, that is going to save you print time. It's going to improve your quality, and it's going to give you better and faster overall results. And so this is something that you should always try and apply is make your products round instead of sharp and try and make them bulkier because the infil doesn't take up much time. Okay, the next one here is that when you're designing a three D printed product, you always want to ask yourself, how does the first layer look? And how is that going to go down? Because in the world of three D printing, if you're going to have a problem, 80% to 90% of the time, it's going to happen because of the first layer not adhering properly or the bed leveling wasn't correct or there was gunk stuck on the nozzle. Whatever it is, most of the time, the problem is going to happen on the first layer. And so if you can make that first layer as simple and as easy to print as possible, it's going to make your life easier, and it's going to improve your reliability. And so if you looked at these two designs right here, I can tell you right now that the square is going to print much more reliably and much easier than the star. The star has a lot of sharp points here, a lot of sharp corners that are likely to peel up and maybe get caught on the nozzle or get stuck on some as it is printing. So if you can make your designs easier to print or make the first layer simpler and rounder, it is always going to make your life much easier. So in this example, if we just give it a base that is circular like this, and then we drop this down to 1 millimeter, and then we center both of these so that it's basically like it looks really good, and it's aligned here. We'll go like this. We'll go like that. We'll bring it both up to the middle there. And now, this is going to be a much easier design to three D print because that first layer, something's off here. So's a little funky. But that first layer is just a round circle. It is no longer a star that has five really sharp points on it. It is just a round circle where the printer is going to go around like that in a really smooth pattern, and then it's going to go back and forth as it creates the infill, and it's going to have like a 99.9% success rate, whereas this star is going to give you some headaches at scale. For sure, without a doubt, I can tell you, right now, you're going to have some challenges with it over time. Now, the next one I want to talk about here is cavities. Some people that are new to the industry or come from a different industry will look at a product like this. They'll say, Okay, we've got a big, solid mass here. Let's just make it empty inside in order to save time and effort. And so they'll maybe take a cube like this and they'll stick it inside, and now all of a sudden the cube is hollow or it doesn't have a lot of a lot of material on the inside. And I'm telling you that is the wrong idea and the wrong concept to execute 99% of the time. Reason that that is wrong is because if you put a pocket or a cavity inside of another product, what's going to happen here is it is going to print the outside wall of that product, and then it's going to have to print the inside wall of that product, and then it's going to have to print the infill around that. And the amount of time and effort and printing that you're going to save is going to be either zero or it's going to add time. Especially if you are considering trying to save material and save weight and save on print time, you are much, much better off reducing the number of perimeters and reducing the infill of that product than you are putting a cavity inside like this. Now, on the reverse side of that, let's say that we had a cylinder like this that was maybe a little bit small, and we didn't want to print it with 100% infill, but we wanted to give it some rigidity and give it a little bit of extra strength. Well, if we take a smaller cylinder and we run it through the center of it, now it's going to do exactly what I said before, and it's going to add a couple extra walls here. And so let's say I wanted to create this cylinder as an axle. I wanted to use it as an axle for a car. I could actually use this to my advantage, and I could add a couple extra walls, and now all of a sudden, I'm going to have a really strong inner casing, a really strong outer casing, and I might be able to actually use that as a way to strengthen my part. And so what you want to think about here is, if you're trying to put a cavity inside of a product to save weight, you're way better off just reducing the perimeters and reducing the actual infill of that part. If you are trying to put a cavity inside of a product to build strength, that makes sense, but you probably also want to increase the walls, as well. And so you can use this concept of putting cavities inside products, but it just needs to be used for the right situation and the right scenario. Saving weight and saving material is usually not that scenario. Putting a cavity inside of another part is usually a good idea if you're trying to add strength without adding a ton of weight. That's usually the best way to do it. Okay, next topic that I want to talk about here is layer lines. If we print a cube that looks like this, what's going to happen here is we are going to have layers around the four outside perimeters. So this side, this side, this side and this side, you're going to be able to see the vertical layer lines. And then on the top, you're going to have an infill pattern. Usually, it's just a zig zag side to side, but it's going to look different than the sides. And then on the bottom, it has it's touching the actual print bed surface. And so that is also going to have a very different texture and appearance than the top and then the sides. And so if we just print the cube like this, we're going to end up with basically three different kind of textures or appearances on the outside of this cube. And now, there's a couple of different ways to handle that and to get around that. Number one would be to add a fuzzy skin in your slicer. What that's going to do is add a little bit of noise to the perimeters and give it a little bit of a rougher texture. Only challenge with that is that it's not going to do that to the bottom. And so what we are going to do to basically solve this problem and the best way to handle this situation is that we're actually going to chop off just a little corner of the cube right here, hopefully in an area where the customers not really going to notice or it's not going to impact the functionality of the product. And what we're going to do is now we are going to rotate this so that that basically little area right there is what is going to be touching the surface. So now if I raise Oh, we went too far there. Now, if I raise this up here, and it's at zero. If I printed it in this orientation, this is going to be the only area that is touching the build plate, and the rest of this product is all going to look the exact same with regards to the texture and appearance, especially if you put a fuzzy skin on it. And so you do lose a little bit of design control, and you have to create a flat surface here, but the rest of the product, the other 95% of the product is now going to have a very, very similar visual appearance. And so if you're worried about layer lines, this is the strategy that I would recommend going with. Try and find a way to put the product on its edge or on its corner. Mount it there, so it has very, very little contact with the build plate and then use a fuzzy skin so that you can get a uniform surface over almost the entirety of the whole part. That is going to be the best way to help you achieve that. And if you ever need some supports in here, what you can do is you can create basically what you're doing. You're going to create a manual support here so that you don't have the software doing it for you, and you're going to shrink this down. You're going to move it in here, and then you're just going to build a little connector between them. And so I'll just show you real quick here what it looks you're just gonna build a connector between these parts just like this. One there, we'll do another one there and move it over so that it connects. And now, what's going to happen is this block here is going to support and act as the support for this product. And then when you're done, all you're going to have to do is just snip off these tiny little tabs right here, and the product is going to come out basically looking almost perfect with the maximum amount of the surface area all looking the same way. And so lots of different ways to look at this, but these are some of the design principles that you're going to want to keep in mind when you're designing your product. Make them bulky, avoid 90 degree corners, avoid supports at all costs. Try and make the appearance of it uniform throughout the entire shape. Make that first layer as simple as possible and don't add cavities unless you're trying to add support without adding weight at 100% infil. That is the only time that adding cavities makes sense to your products. Also, the last thing that I would say is try and go through this process in iterations. Try and design for functionality, and then try and design for appearance, and then try and design for printing and then try and design for efficiency. Go through it in iterations. You don't have to get the design right on the first go, and we're going to talk about that more in some of the future videos. I hope this one helped, and we'll see you in the next. 6. Shopify Intro : Alright, everybody, welcome back to another video. In this one, we're just going to make it really quick and simple. And I'm going to walk you through the business model of selling your products on Shopify. I'm going to tell you how this works, and I'm also going to tell you what you're going to need in order to get started, so let's jump right in. Okay, so very simply, the business model when selling products on Shopify is that number one, you're going to create a website in order to sell your products. Your job is to make the best website that you possibly can so that the highest number of people that go to your website end up purchasing on your website. That is going to be the bulk of the work here, and that's where we're going to put a lot of the focus. Number two here is that you're going to need to send traffic to your website. Shopify is not like EtsN. It's not like Amazon, where there are marketplaces that people are just going to organically find your product and find your listing. Almost nobody is going to organically find your website, especially in the early days. And so it is going to be your job to send the traffic to Shopify. The advantage of Shopify over Etsy and Amazon is that you own the customer information. You know where that shipment is going to. You have their contact information. Hopefully, they're signing up for your email list, as well, and you own the relationship between the website and the customer. Amazon and Etsy own the relationship when you are selling on those platforms. And so that is one of the big advantages with Shopify. You are also going to pay way less fees compared to Amazon and Etsy. Number three here, though, is that you are going to need to fulfill the orders that come from your website. Once you learn how to send traffic to your website and people start purchasing on the website, you then need to fulfill those orders. When it comes to fulfillment through Shopify, you have two main options here. Number one is you can fulfill the orders yourself, meaning that an order comes in, you go to the printer, you start the print, you finish the printing, you ship it out to the customer, or you store it in inventory as another option here. But basically, what's happening is that you are fulfilling each individual order. Okay, now, the other option here, personally, this is the option that I'm going down right now. I'm going to teach you everything you need to know, but you can connect your ShopiI store to a print farm specifically in the United States, and that print farm, when the order comes in, they will print the product and they will send it out to the end consumer. Now, the downside here is that they're going to charge you for it and they're going to charge you more than what you could print it for however, they are going to handle all of the work. They're going to do all the logistics. They're going to ship it out for you at a decent rate. And so what's nice about this is that if they do all of the fulfillment, then all you have to worry about is product development, building a good website, and sending ads. You don't have to worry about running a print farm. So you've got two different options there, and I'm going to walk you through both options. The starting out is very, very similar. The only difference is how you fulfill those orders. Now, a couple of things that you are going to need before we get started here. Number one, you're going to need product photos. There's no point in doing all this work to set up your website if you don't have any photos of your products yet, especially in scene photos are really, really helpful for the website. So if you don't have that yet, you might want to work on it. Number two, here is a domain name and a website. I'm going to walk you through how to get that in another video. So search through the videos if you haven't seen that already, but you are going to need to own a domain name so that we can tie your website to that domain name so that people can find you at zachhartle.com or.ca or whatever it is that you decide to choose. Number four here, you are going to need a social media channel. That is more than likely how you are going to end up driving traffic to your website. So setting that up early, starting to make content on it early and testing out some content strategies can be very, very advantageous, but you are going to need these four things in order to get this website up and running. You're basically going to need numbers one to three before you can do anything. So I would highly recommend starting there. If you don't know how to take product photos or you don't know how to buy a domain name, check out my other videos. If you don't know how to get a Shopify subscription, then this course probably isn't for you because all you got to do is go to shopify.com. Sign up for a website. It's very, very simple, and it shouldn't take you very long. And then, again, like I said, it's better to start the social media content earlier rather than later so at least you can get kind of a head start. So I hope this gets you kind of set up and sort of aware of what's about to happen here. In the next video, I'm going to dive right into setting up your Shopify store, showing you what mine looks like. I'm even going to show you some of the products that I'm selling, and I'm doing this to help you out. So please I hope this brings value to you, and we'll see you in the next one. 7. Shopify Setup : Alright, everybody. Welcome back to another video. In this one, I am going to walk you through how to use the Shopify platform. I'm going to give you an example of what my website looks like. I'm going to show you all of my settings. And I'm going to give you my best advice and a quick tutorial as to how to use the platform most efficiently, so let's jump right in. Okay, so this is my Shopifi dashboard, but let's first go to the website. So this is my website. These are the products that I sell. I sell liners and accessories for Milwaukee Power Tools. That's one of my primary product lines. I do have a couple, but this is the one that we are going to use as an example for this course. And so this is what the website looks like. So you click on any of these products here. We'll go to we'll go to I don't where's my homepage? Let's go to the homepage here. Let's go to one of these grinders. You can see I've got product photos. I've got a listing with all the information about the product. I got a return policy. I've got a video. I've got other products that somebody might like to buy. This is what my website looks like, and what your job is to do is to try and create a website just like this and then make it better than this over time. And so Shop AFI is the platform that we are going to use in order to do this, just to show you guys what my store looks like, will refresh the page here. And in the last 30 days, you can see that I've done $6,211 over 73 orders, but my conversion rate is absolutely terrible. So that's what I am working on right now as an entrepreneur is trying to increase my conversion rate so that I can bring in more sales for every hundred customers that go to my store. That is something that we will get you to eventually now. What I'm going to do here in this video is I'm going to walk you through all of the different options on the left hand side here, including the settings. And we are going to go through every single tab here, and you are going to understand what it does, how to use it, and what it means for your website. This platform and this dashboard here is basically the back end version of your website. This is what we would call the front end version. This is what the customers are seeing. And this dashboard here is everything behind the scenes. And so this is what we are going to use to control our Shopify business and to control our website. So first things that I want to walk you through here are the top section right here. This is where you are going to find all of the things that you can control, like your products, your marketing, your finances. This is where the core of what you are going to want to do is going to be. Underneath that, you have your sales channels. For us, the primary sales channel is going to be the online store. This is where we are actually going to design the store. And then at the bottom here is settings. This is where you are going to kind of fine tune all the little details about your store. To get us started, we are currently on the homepage. This is my dashboard. You can change things up here. You can see what the sales were like in the last seven days. It will give you a bunch of alerts here. I will tell you a bunch of stuff about your business, and it will try and give you a bunch of different suggestions for how to improve your store. I highly recommend going through this, analyzing it, and just seeing if it applies to your situation. If it doesn't, you can just ignore it or exit it or leave it alone, and you'll never have to look at it again. Now, this is the dashboard that shows you basically what is happening at a super high level here. The next one here is the orders. As you can see, I have 71 orders that are active right now. All of these people have ordered product from my website. Here is the total. Here's the status. And this is basically going to give me a summary of all the different orders that are currently in my system, and then I can click on them. I can zoom into those orders, and you can basically see all of the information about this specific order and what this person has purchased from my website. And so this is where you would go in and you can find the order. You can fulfill it. You can go from here. And if somebody calls you up and they're like, Hey, I want to buy something, you can also go here and you can create an order, and you can add it into your system manually. So it doesn't have to go through your website. You've got a lot of control here with Shopify. Now, the next page under orders here is products. This is where you're going to list your products that you're going to sell on your website. In order to list a product, you are going to click on Add product here. And you're going to give it a title. You're then going to give it a description. You're going to upload your photos, and you're going to choose a category. Basically, this is just kind of what product it is or what category does that product fall into. You then need to choose your price. You need to tell Shopify how much it costs, so it can calculate your profit for you. If you want, that is not a requirement, though. You need to decide if you want to track your inventory for us and my store, I don't track the quantity because everything is made to order, but it's really going to depend on your personal setup. You want to choose where that product is going to come from. For me, most of my products are coming from the print farm in the United States. Then you need to decide what you're going to do a shipping. For me, everything is a physical product, but I have free shipping on my store. I recommend you try and do the same if possible, because it will increase your conversion rate hopefully. So for me, shipping doesn't really matter, but it is a physical product. Once I have uploaded the description, I've uploaded the title, and I've uploaded some photos here, that product is ready to go. You want to make sure that the status is set to active, and then you want to click on Save and publish, and that product will now be available in your store. Just to show you what mine looks like, I sell my products for $50. Here's the title up here, and then this is basically the description that I use. I use a couple of bullet points to separate out the key ideas. I say, who this product is perfect for. I say, what's included with it. I say what it works with, and then I give instructions. I give it a final reason as to why to choose this product, and then if somebody doesn't like it, they're well aware of the return policy as well. And then I have a video that demonstrates the product. I highly recommend that you put in the effort on your product page to try and give the customer as much information as possible to make the best decision possible. It is only going to help you in the long run. And so when it comes to the product page, try and put effort into this, this is something that is going to be absolutely crucial. Once you have all of your products uploaded, you're going to be able to sort them into collections. Collections are basically categories for your products that you get to decide on. So for me, I have products that are liners, and I have products that are accessories. I separate them out so that I can kind of decide which one I want to showcase where, and I can show this collection here or this collection here on my website. Inventory is what's going to help you track your inventory if you need to add or subtract it, or you're keeping items in stock. This is going to be really crucial for you, and all you need to do is use the tools that Shopify has given you. It's going to show you how many are unavailable. It's going to show you how many are available. You can add or remove units. Whatever you need to do, it is a tool that is there if you store inventory. Purchase orders here. This is something that is pretty interesting. Purchase orders will help you track and receive inventory from your suppliers. So if you're purchasing filament for your print farm, this can be a very useful tool for you. You also have transfers of inventory between different locations. This is probably not going to apply to most of us that are just getting set up. And then, of course, you have gift cards. I highly recommend allowing the sale of gift cards through your store, because it can be a great way to drive revenue. But in summary, that is what the products tab looks like. The main thing you're going to want to focus on is the main page here, adding products and making that product look as good as possible. After that, you have your customers. This is going to be a list of all the people that have either purchased from you or have signed up for your email list. Your email list is super, super crucial and super important, and you need to make sure that you're starting one from day one, because that is how you can own the relationship with your customer and you can continuously market to them week in and week out. It is super, super important, and I highly recommend starting it on day one. Next one here is content. If you want to upload any of your photos or videos in bulk, this is going to be the best way to do it. Otherwise, you can do it individually on each product page. When it comes to finances here, this is what's going to give you a breakdown of the money coming from Shopify into your account. As you can see, I've got a payment coming in three days for 470 bucks. I got paid out $293 today. I got $600 yesterday, $1,200 on the fifth. And you can kind of see the numbers going up and down here. This is money that is coming from Shopify. After all the Shop fi fees, and then it's getting basically deposited into my bank account. The analytics here is going to be something that's going to be very, very useful to you once you get some data. Once you get some traffic on your website and you get some sales, this is where you're going to be able to analyze everything that's happening on your website in order to improve the results that are on your website. The goal here is to use this data to increase conversion rates, to bring in more sales, to make more profit. That's why we're doing this. That's the goal and the point of the Analytics tab here. You can also download a variety of different reports, and Shopify's really cool because they give you kind of a live view of where people are tuning into your website from, which my I just think it's really, really neat. Next one here is marketing. As we go down the list here, you can see marketing and you can see all of the different activity and where your traffic is coming from. This is super, super valuable here because it is going to tell you what's working and what's not working and how you can improve that moving forward. You can create activity here. You can run marketing campaigns. You can set up automations. I highly recommend playing with the automation, specifically the abandoned cart, the convert abandoned cart, and the recover abandoned all of these emails here are going to help you increase the conversion rate when 100 people come to your website, how many of them end up making a purchase? That's what we're trying to increase, and that's what I'm referring to when I say conversion rate. And then discounts here, this is going to be really good if you've got friends and family or you've got influencers or you've got people that want to review it, or you just want to run a sale or a promotion. This is where you're going to set all of that up. You're going to create discount rate here, and then you're just going to choose what type of discount you there are endless amounts of options and it's really easy to do. Okay, so now that we've got through sort of this first top section of the Shopify platform here, we're going to go back to the dashboard. If you have any questions, leave a comment on this video, and I'll do my best to get back to you. But the next thing I want to show you here is the online store. And this is where things really start to come together with regards to the front end and the visual look of your website. What you're going to want to do here is you're going to want to choose a theme. The theme is basically the layout of your website, and then you get to customize the photos and the images and the colors. But what you need to do first is choose a theme. I have chosen the trade theme. There's lots of different themes that you can choose from. As you can see, they're all right here. You can also purchase themes if you like one better than the others. But this is where you kind of decide what the layout of your website is going to be. Once you've decided on the theme, you then need to click on Customize. This is where you are going to insert your photos. You're going to choose your liners. You're going to update your logo. You're going to basically decide what the website is actually going to be and what it is going to look like. The goal here is to increase conversions, to build trust, and to make customers feel comfortable purchasing from you. And so you want to do as much as you can. On the left hand side here, you are going to have basically the sections of your website that you are going to be able to customize. And then on the right hand side here, this is where all the kind of fine details like the text and the font and things like that are going to pop up. So for instance, right now, I don't I have an announcement bar that says free shipping in the USA. If I want to change that, all I'm going to do is click on free shipping in the USA, and I'm going to be able to basically remove that and write Zach is awesome or whatever I want in there. And then if I hit Save, it's going to update to my website. So let's do it. I'll just show you what it looks like. And so as of right now, you can see free shipping in the USA. If I refresh this, now it says Zac is awesome. And so this is how we are going to control the front end of our website. So we'll turn this back to free shipping in the USA, and we will save it, and it will be ready to go. And now everybody knows that we have free shipping in the USA. And it is quite literally that simple all the way down the website. And so, for instance, I've got a featured collection right here. I have a collection, like I talked about just a few minutes ago. The first collection here is Packot liners. These are all liners that fit inside of a toolbox. The next collection here is wall accessories that fit on the packot wall and so I have separated my products into two separate collections so that I can show them individually on the website and so that they're nicely grouped together. When I click on the actual featured collection right here, and I go to the right side, I can change the title. I can change the heading size. I can change the font. I can change the description style. I can basically customize what this page looks like. And so what you need to do is figure out what your brand is, what your style is, how modern you want your website to look, and then you need to go through the settings and adjust it accordingly. And then the nice thing is, you can go all the way down here, so I have a featured collection. I have a second featured collection, and then I have a multi column right here which shows shipping, warranty and quality policies. And then I have a featured product here that I'm really trying to sell. This is kind of a main product that I want to focus on moving. And so it's hosted right here on the main page. I also have an email sign up, which I highly recommend, again, that you should have on your website. I have a focus on function and quality, a little text about the company. I have an FAQ in case anybody is curious or has questions shipping time or where the products are made. And then I have a contact form in case anybody has questions and wants to reach out to us. And then at the bottom, I have menus to our shipping policy, our return policy, all of our products, basically everything that you would need is there and available at the bottom, and then links to our social media. And so to customize this, all you do is you click on the section, you go over to the right and you change whatever settings are available to you. It's very, very easy, and you basically do that for every single page of your website. What I would recommend is finding other websites and trying to copy what you think works well or looks good for them. It is going to depend on your product. It's going to depend on your brand. It's going to depend on your personal style. But what I would recommend is go to a couple of different popular websites, try and find some inspiration and then try and pull that inspiration and bring that back into your website using the theme and the settings that are available to you. That is going to be the best way to do this. Now, the other thing that I would recommend here is on the left side, you can see the theme settings, and you can also see appebd here. The app andbd isn't going to be super important to you, but the theme settings are what is going to allow you to put your logo in here or put a favicon in the tab right here, or put in some animation so that things come sliding in from the left side or the right side. Anything like that is going to be held in the settings here. And so I recommend you go through this tab by tab to make sure that it aligns with how you want the website to look like. I could give you a template, but honestly, your brand is going to be different than my brand. My brand is super masculine focused on power tools, and more than likely not everybody is going to be like that. And so what you need to do is you need to go through. You need to upload your logo. You need to choose your colors. You need to choose what font you like best, and you need to customize the website to fit the style and the brand of your product line and your company. So that is the summary here. I hope this helps. I know this is kind of a brief run through, and I'm going through it very quickly, but it's super important. One thing that helps a lot with organic traffic or people finding you on Google, though, is creating content specifically blogs. And so if you have a product or a niche or an industry that you can write about, I highly recommend writing some blog posts or using chat GBT to write some blog posts, and then posting them to your website, it's really going to help you out, and it's going to help you get found on Google. Next one here is pages. So you're probably wondering how I created a return policy or shipping policy, things like that. All I did was I created a new page and I entered in all of the information in the content here. Then when you go to view, we can see what this page actually looks like. So here you go, return policy, and it's basically everything that I put into this content block right here, and it allows me to create a new page of my website. When it comes to navigating the website through the different menus, you saw at the bottom here, I have a menu of all these different options. Then I also have this menu at the top. That menu can be controlled by the navigation tab right here, where you can choose the main menu or the footer menu, and you can control what pages are in that menu. So if you go to the online store, you create a page about your return policy. You can then add that page to your footer menu right here, you just click on Add Menu item, and then you choose the page that you wanted. It's very, very simple and it's very, very user friendly, but that's how you manage the navigation on your website. Next thing we need to talk about here is preference honestly, there isn't a whole lot here, but if you ever wanted to shut down your website and protect it with a password, this is where you would do it. This is where you insert your logo. This is where you connect your Google and Facebook pixels, and you protect people from spam. So not a whole lot on this page, but it can be fairly important. Point of Sale here is when you plan to sell in person. Shop is when you're using the Shopify Shopify app, Shopify Shop app. Um, I've only had one sale come through there, and I'm not an expert into it, so we are not going to dive into it right now. I'm going to try and give you more content on that once I am better Ut date and better up to speed with it. Now the last one here is the inbox. This is where people are going to be able to message you. You're going to be able to reply to them, and you're going to handle most of your customer service from the inbox here. And then I have my website currently connected to TikTok because I am running TikTok ads to drive traffic, but we are going to talk about that in a future video. Last one here is email. Like I said, I highly recommend starting an email list as soon as possible, collecting those names. And as you can see, I've already sent 137 emails. 67% of the people opened those emails, and 11% opened it. And we brought in 200 sales with that last email that just went out on Tuesday. And it is something that is going to start off slow like where I'm at right now, but it is going to grow quickly over time, and it is going to become one of the strongest marketing tools that you have as an entrepreneur. Okay, now that we've gone through all of the main options on the left hand side here, let's start talking about the settings. There is a lot to go through here, and it's sort of like designing your website. You're going to need to click on each tab here and make sure that it is set up how you want. Now, the general tab here is going to allow you to choose your unit system, and it's also going to allow you to choose the currency that you want to operate in. Personally, right now, I highly recommend operating in US dollars because it's super valuable compared to almost anything else. But this is going to be just a basic page that you want to double check, and you want to also manage your order processing. If you are fulfilling orders yourself, you don't want to fulfill any of the orders automatically. And the other thing that you're going to want to check here is order processing. Depending on how you set up your fulfillment, this is something that could change. But as of right now, you're probably going to want to leave it on Don't fulfill the items automatically. Next one here is the Shopify Plan. This is where you're going to be to choose the different levels of the Shopify plan that you want. Right now, mine costs $51 Canadian per month. And if somebody purchases online, it costs me 2.8% of the purchase, and then $0.30 no matter what. And so, something that you need to consider. This is going to be a monthly cost for you, and it's something that you're going to have to pay for. Billing is basically just a summary of what Shopify is billing towards you. Then users in permissions is how you're going to give other people access to your website. After that, you have payments. This is basically going to be how you're accepting payments. Right now I'm using Shopify payments as well as PayPal. I highly recommend PayPal because people still use it and people really like it. Checkout experience here, this is where you're going to be able to kind of configure your checkout and configure what information is required from your customers in order to actually check out. So, for instance, if you want to require a phone number or an email, you can control all of that right here. Next one is customer accounts. If you want your customers to be able to create an account on your website and maybe track their order history or see what they've ordered in the past, this is where you're going to be able to set that up. The next one here is shipping and delivery. This is probably the most important tab on all of the settings here, because if people can't figure out how to ship the product and get the product delivered to their house, they're not going to buy it. And so if you have any issues with your shipping right, they're not going to be able to check out on their website. So you need to make sure that this is button down and absolutely perfect. If you want to keep things really, really simple, factor the shipping into the price that you are selling that product for and offer free shipping. It's going to make your life much, much easier. For me, what I'm doing, like I said, I offer free shipping in the United States, and if somebody buys from Canada, I charge them an extra $25 because the shipping from the US print farm to Canada is a little bit ridiculous, and like I said, I don't want to be fulfilling orders, so this is the method that I'm using. Next one is taxes and duties. This one is going to depend on where you live and what your requirements are. I still have to set this up a little bit. The store is kind of new. So I'm going to be working on this over the next few weeks. I can't give you advice on this because it's going to be completely dependent on your personal situation and whether you're doing this as a company, as a personal venture, and where you are located. Next one here is locations. If you have multiple warehouses, if you have multiple print farms or you're connecting to a different print farm, this is where you're going to want to set that up. Super, super important here if you're having somebody else fulfill it. If you're not having somebody else fulfill it, this isn't going to matter a whole lot to you. Next one is markets. This is basically going to be how you manage the currency conversion rate and where you decide to sell your products. This is super, super important and can be very, very helpful for making sure that somebody from the other side of the world doesn't order your product, accidentally get free shipping, and then you're on the hook to either let them down or fork out the money and deal with customs. It's a terrible situation. Get ahead of it right away. Next one is apps and sales channels, is where it's going to give you a breakdown of all of the apps that you have downloaded to your Shopify store. Honestly, these days, Shopify is really good, so you don't need a ton of apps. Only download the ones that you really, really need. Right here is domains. This is where you're going to connect the domains that you purchase, and then we are going to link it to the Shopify store right here. All you're going to do is connect existing domain if you buy it through go Daddy, follow the steps, and it will link it up in like 20 minutes or so. It does take a little while to kind of connect everything online, but the process is only going to take you like 2 minutes to click through everything. Next one is customer events here. This is basically focused on pixels. A pixel is something that allows TikTok to track who is on your website and what they did so that they can better advertise. This is where you are going to set that up, and this is where you're going to make sure that Tik Tok pixel is connected properly. If this is green and says connected, it's ready to go. Same thing with Instagram or any of the other platforms. Last one here or not last one, but next one here is notifications. This is where it is going to send you alerts and what alerts it is going to send you. If you want to get notified every time you bring in an order or you want to ch ching ring tone on your phone, this is where you're going to set that up. Next one here is custom data. This is where you're going to be able to kind of customize your website. If you are new to this, I recommend staying away from it. It is not going to be worth your time. But if you are more interested in the metafeld and some SEO stuff and really getting into the Ny gritty, you're going to be able to access a lot of that here. Next one is languages, especially if you sell something in other countries where the default language is not English. This can be extremely helpful because it will automatically convert the text that is on your website. Last one here or not last one again, but customer privacy. I would use the automated settings for all of this because it's just going to eliminate any risk, and you won't have to set anything up, and it'll take you 2 minutes. And you'll have a privacy policy. You'll have a cookie banner. You'll have everything you need. Keep your website in compliance where you are operating. So I would just go with the automated solutions here. And the last one. Finally, the last one here is the policies. Again, privacy policy. I've just gone with automated return and refund policy. I've set my own here. And then terms of service and shipping policy are also available on my website, and contact information has its own section on the homepage there. And so that is how I've kind of managed all of these different aspects. And so Whew. That was a lot of talking. That was like 26 minutes. But that is basically a summary of all the different features of Shopify that you're going to need to know. It's a high level summary of what they have and how you can use it. But you are going to need to do a little bit more research. If you have any issues with it, look for a YouTube video, ask ChaEPT or put it in the search bar right here, and you should be able to figure it out. Honestly, Shopify is very, very intuitive. And so anything that you're trying to do, you should be able to do. And if you can't figure it out, YouTube, hat Chi BT, search Br right here. And then if that doesn't help you at all, reach out to me, ask me a question, leave a comment, send me a DM, whatever it is. I am here to support. I'm here to help you. And I hope that this video helped, and we'll see you in the next one. 8. Fulfillent: Alright, everybody. Welcome back to another video. Now that you understand the basics of the business model behind Shopify as well as how Shopify works, let's start talking about fulfillment and the two options that we have as entrepreneurs building this business. So the two options that we have are number one, once we set up our website, we can fulfill the orders ourself, or number two, we can connect those orders to a print farm in the United States that is going to fulfill those orders for us. Now, if we want to ship internationally and we want to ship in Europe or Asia or Canada, connecting another print farm might not be the best opportunity because you have less control over the logistics. However, if you plan to sell in the United States, which I am doing, this is a fantastic option. But first, let's just talk about self fulfillment. So how this is going to work, number one, you're going to set up notifications, like we talked about in the last video. And then when an order comes in, it is going to be your responsibility to print that product or to have it printed and then to ship that product to the end consumer, which means taking that product, putting it in a box, slapping a shipping label on it, and getting it out the door. And then you have to go back into Shopify, and you have to mark that order as fulfilled. Just to give you an idea of what this looks like, we're going to go to our homepage here. We're going to click on Orders. Choose any of the orders. This one just came in a little while ago. They're looking for one product right here. That means that I need to go to my print farm. I need to create that product. I need to put it in a box. I can use Amazon or sorry, I can use Shopify to create the shipping label for me and go through their process and use their discounted shipping rates. Or the other option is that I can ship it myself through UPS, FedEx, whatever service I want, and then I can fulfill item. And what it's going to do is it's going to ask for a tracking number. It's going to ask for the carrier, and it is going to notify the customer that that order has now been fulfilled, and here is your tracking number. Once you have completed that, that's basically it. What you might want to do is follow up with the customer in a few weeks by email or automate that sequence and ask for review, things along those lines, whatever you can do to increase your revenue and increase your conversion rate on your website. That is what it looks like in order to fulfill orders yourself. Now, with regards to the second option here, this is the print Farm connection where we are going to connect our Shopify store to a print firm in the United States that is then going to fulfill that order for us. Print farm that we are connecting to is called Slant three D. They run a YouTube channel. The guy that runs it, his name is Gabe. He's absolutely awesome. They have an amazing business, and they are allowing other entrepreneurs to sell three D printed products without needing to build out a print firm. And it's really, really nice because now you could run a product development business. You could have one printer and all you do is prototype and design, and then you can use Slant three D to handle all of the production, and all you have to do is just bring in the sales. So it's absolutely amazing. So, step one is you need to connect your Shop fi website to an app called ShipStation ShipStation is a platform that can bring in all of your orders from Shopify from Etsy, from Tik Tok, from Amazon, from all of those different places, and they basically amalgamated into one central platform for processing orders. And so you've got Shopify here that is going to send all of the order information to an app called ShipStation. Once it is in ShipStation, you're going to connect ShipStation to the Teleport app which is designed and created by Slant three D. That is basically how they understand what to print. And so the order is going to go from Shopify to ShipStation, and then Slant three D is going to pull that order out of ShipStation, and they're going to print that product for you, and they're going to deliver it to the customer. And so, step one, connect your Shopify store to ShipStation. Step two, connects ShipStation to Teleport. And then step three, once you have connected ShipStation to Teleport, you need to show it when an order comes in for product number XYZ, these are the files that are associated with that product that they need to print and send out to customers. Now, just to show you what this actually looks like in reality, we'll go to my Shopify store, and you can see all of the orders. The last one came in from Bo Metcalf. If we go to ShipStation, you can see that I have an Etsy store and a Shopify store that are connected to ShipStation. So ShipStation is taking my orders from Etsy and Shopify and amalgamating them in ShipStation. And we can see all the orders if we go to the Orders tab right here. I'm going to refresh this so that the new ones come in here and we'll see the Bo Metcalf order pop up, hopefully, fingers crossed. Awaiting shipment. I have one new order. We're going to refresh this page. And right there, you can see the Bo Metcalf order is in here. It came in 23 minutes ago. And now all of my orders that are awaiting shipment are sitting here in ShipStation. And if we go to the Slant three D teleport on the top left hand side here, you can see here are all of my orders. Here are all of the orders that are currently in process right now, and here is the order from Bo Metcalf. You can see we got three products in there, or we have three files that are associated with this product, and this order comes in. Slant three D will print these three files. They will send them out to the customer, and they will fulfill that order for me, which is really, really nice and convenient because it means that I don't have to do a whole lot of work here. And so on this order, these numbers aren't great. I might have to adjust my pricing on this one, but I brought in $50 worth of revenue. Cost me $10.09 to ship it to the customer. Cost me $38 to print it, gives me a total of 48 24, which leaves me with $1.76. And so this is a brand new product that just launched. Obviously, I'm going to have to adjust the price of this product because $1.76 on $50 in sales is not very good. You can see all of my other products, though, they're generating ten to $50 per sale. This is a new product that I'm obviously gonna have to adjust the price on. Now, this product has come in here and it's been automatically matched. The nice thing about that is that I don't have to do anything. Once the product is matched, it's going to go from Shopify to ShipStation to slant three D to this app right here, and it's going to get automatically fulfilled, so I'm completely hands off. But if a product gets ordered for the first time, I'm going to have to match that product, which means I'm going to have to upload my files to the platform here, and then I'm going to have to go to my products, and I'm going to have to match that product to those specific files so that when an order comes in, Slant three D knows which files to print to fulfill that product. And so everything's on the left hand side here. You've got your orders as well as your order history, so you can see all of the orders from throughout time. You've also got a listing of all of your products and whether or not they have been matched. So this one that is white right here has not been matched. And then under matches here, this matches tab, what it does is it shows you the product with all of the files that are associated to that product, which is really nice. And then, like you saw before, this is the files page where you can upload the individual STL files that you want to get printed when a product gets ordered. And then on the last page, this is just your account information. And in summary, what is happening is orders coming in from Shopify. The orders are then getting amalgamated at ShipStation, and Slant three D is printing any orders that it sees in ShipStation, and it is fulfilling that order and sending it to your customer, and then it goes back to Shopify, and it will mark that order as fulfilled. It'll show you if it's in transit or whether or not it has been delivered. It is a very, very smooth system because once you get the products matched to the files, all you have to do is sell, baby, sell, and everything else is taken care of. You may have a couple of customers asking for tracking info or questions or maybe they didn't get an email, anything like that or returns, but other than that, your whole focus is product development and sales. And so it makes the business very, very simple and allows you to not have to focus on running a print farm and scaling up production and sourcing filament and the headache that is associated with running that business. And Uh, I've already gone through the process here. Like I said, comes in through Shopify, goes to ShipStation, gets filled by the Slant Print farm, and then your job is to bring in another order. Now, with regards to connecting Shopify to ShipStation and then ShipStation to Slant three D, there's a couple of small details that you're going to want to know about. And instead of me remaking all of the videos from Slant three D just to regurgitate the same information, I'm going to do is I'm going to link them in this video. You can go to these websites directly, or you can go to the resources tab for this course. All of the links will be in there. But Gabe, the owner of Slant three D, has put together tutorials for exactly how to make those connections and set this up. So there's no point in me remaking those videos. My goal here is to show you how to use what they have built in order to make money. And so I'm going to leave it here. I'm going to tell you go to those links, watch those videos, learn how to make those connections. Once it is set up and it is connected, my job is to help you bring in as much money and as much profit as possible. I hope this video helped. I hope these examples are helping, and I'll see you in the next video. 9. Domain, Email and Contact: Alright, everybody, welcome back to another video. In this one, we're going to talk about setting up your domain name, setting up your email, and setting up your customer service, so let's jump right in. Okay, so to get us started, I would recommend buying your domain name from Go Daddy. That is the platform that I've been using for years and years, and so far, it's worked out really well for me. The reason that you want a domain name is because that is what people are going to type in to the website address bar in order to find your website. It's also going to kind of help you rank for Google. It's going to be basically what people are searching you by. So it is fairly important. For me, I'm looking at a brand called Tidytool. I already own the domain, but we are going to get tidytool.org. So all you have to do to see if your domain is available is go in here and type search domain. Ideally, you want to name your company or name your product with a domain that something that you can actually get, something you can obtain because it's just going to make your life and your branding a lot easier and a lot better. And so, as you can see, tidytool.org is available for $9.99. But if I typed in tidytool.ca, that one is not going to be available, unfortunately, because I already own it, but let's just do one that I don't own. So let's do apple.com is unfortunately not going to be available. Now, don't click on this brokerage fee and get Go Daddy to represent you to try and buy apple.com because Apple's not going to sell it. If you can figure out that the domain that you want is owned by some individual dude in the woods, that's been owning it for 20 years and is probably willing to sell it, then this service is really worth it. But if you're trying to buy google.com or apple.ca, then don't spend any money trying to do it because it's just not gonna work. And so, for us, we are going to buy tidytool.org, and this is going to be the process that we use in order to purchase our domain, and this is what Shopify is going to use to host our domain. So our website that we're building on Shopify, that is going to be hosted on this domain. And so when people type in tidytool.org, it will take them to the website that I am building. And so, all you have to do is click on Make it Rs. It's going to add it to your cart. We're going to then go to my cart, and we are going to check out with it. Now, here you can see that five years of owning this domain is going to cost you $101, and it's 11% off. What I would recommend is buying it just for one year. It might cost you a little bit more over the course of five years. But if things don't work out and the website doesn't work out, or you change the name or you rebrand or you merge with somebody, at least you haven't dumped $100 into it. And so for one year, it's 999. It's 56% discount. This is what I would recommend you go with. I wouldn't recommend buying the full domain protection. It's usually not worth it, as long as you're not doing anything nefarious. And so we're going to go continue to you're going to have to go through the checkout process here on Go Daddy. It does take a little bit. So full domain protection, we don't want it. Tell the world your site is coming soon. It's included with the domain. You can leave that on. Here is where you might want to consider purchasing something. Now, what I would recommend is getting one of these email plans. It's probably going to change depending on where you are and what's available. But I would recommend buying one of these email plans so that it's just directly linked with your domain name so that you can go info at tidtool.org or John at tidytol.org. I will help you look professional. It will help you maintain your branding. And this is just a nice easy way to do that. So if you are going to set up email, what I would recommend and you should set up email so that it looks professional. I would recommend doing it here and choosing one of these plans depending on what works best for you. Usually, the cheapest plan is probably going to be enough for most people. For us, we'll click on the cheapest one. We'll go continue to CRT. And then it is going to hopefully bring us to the Checko page, I believe. Alright, here we go. One year tidytol.org, 999. We don't need the domain protection. We are going to get 365 email essentials, 11 88 for a year. It's worth it. You need an email address for your business, so you might as well. Once you have this, all you need to do is click Ready for checkout and pay for it. I'm not going to do it right now because I already have an email tied to tidytool.com, so there's no point in me buying another one, and I actually don't need this domain because I already own net.com. So not a big deal for me, but this is the process you would go through. You would click Ready for checkout. You would process your payment, and then you would go through the process to set up your email. That is going to give you a Jonathan at tidytool.org or a Zack at tidytool.org, and you're going to use that to manage all of your customer service. At least that's what I would recommend. You can use your regular email address or another email address if you want, it just looks a little bit more professional. But this is how you buy the domain. You click on Checkout, and then it will basically be in your products here on Go Daddy. Now, once you've got that set up, you're going to want to go back to your main dashboard here for your website, and what you're going to want to do is go down to the settings. The settings here is where you're going to basically implement the domain that you have just purchased. You're going to click on Domain. You're going to click click on Connect existing domain, and you're just going to follow the steps. You're going to type in tidytol.org or whatever your domain is that you just purchased, and all you're going to do is try and follow the steps to automatically connect it. If you can't automatically connect it, it is going to give you information and instructions for how to connect it. You just need to take those instructions very slowly, follow them step by step, and make sure that you do it correctly. It's basically guided instructions, though, so it shouldn't be very difficult. Once you have your domain connected, you'll be able to go to that domain. You'll be able to type it in, and it's going to bring you to your website. So, for instance, packotaccessories.co, packoaccessories.co again, heartleprinting.com, heartleprinting.com. And then the Shopify domains that they have also sent here. And so if we go to any of those domains, let's go to heartleprinting.com, it's actually going to take us to the PaCOut Accessories website. Se right here. And packoutaccessories.co is kind of the lead domain here. And so that is so here you go. Pao accessories.co is the primary for the online store. And so that is kind of the lead domain that everything is going to direct to. But if somebody types in hartleprinting.com, it's going to go to my website. And so what you're trying to do is buy the domain on Go Daddy, connect it through Shopify, so that your website is basically going to go live. Now, I recommended purchasing the email through Go Daddy because once you have it, all you have to do is type in your store details here and edit your email address, and it is going to allow you to then send and receive emails and customer service notifications and messages to that email, and that is how you're going to manage your customer service. And so what I would recommend connect your domain and then input your email address right here and then go to your website, and what I would recommend is adding a contact us section. So for me, I think I actually have it as an entire page on my website. So if you go to pages here, you can create a new page and add a page here. I'll show you what mine looks like. It's basically just a contact page. And then when you go to the template here, you're going to select contact instead of default. You're going to click on Contact. And what it's going to do here is when you go to view that page, it's going to show basically all the info that Somini needs to fill out their name, their contact info, and what they want to write to you about. And then it's going to go directly to that email that you have linked to your account. And that is where you're going to go back and forth with any of the customers that have issues, at least when you're getting started. Then the last thing that I would recommend here is when you're on your homepage, go to content right here and go to menus. And then in this area, you'll be able to click on the main menu as well as the Footer Menu. The Footer Menu is going to be at the very bottom of all your web pages. The main menu is going to be at the top. And what you can do is you can add that contact page to these menu so that when you go to your website, contact is right in this top menu here, and it's also going to be in the menu at the very bottom of the page right here, and it's going to take you to that contact page. Customer is going to be able to type in whatever they want, and they'll be able to send you a message over email. I hope this video helps, and we'll see you in the next one. 10. Website Traffic: All right, everybody, welcome back to another video. This video is probably going to be the juiciest one of them all, it's probably going to be the one that hopefully makes you the most money. It is about how to send traffic to your website and how to actually bring in sales. And so let's just dive into it from the top. This is a topic that I'm actually pretty excited about. At the beginning of this, we went through the business model of selling on Shopify. Step one was that we're going to create a website and sell our products. I put together a 25 minute video about how to actually do that on Shopify. You're going to have to learn a couple of things, but I gave you the outline of it. Step three is that we are going to fulfill orders from our website. In the last video, I walked you through how to connect to a farm in the United States that will fulfill the orders for you. Or I walked you through how to fulfill the orders yourself. Now we are going to talk about step number two. We are going to send traffic to our website. How do we do that, though? Well, you have two options. Number one, you can get organic traffic, which means somebody is coming across your company somehow, and they ended up clicking on your website or typing it into their browser, and now they are on your website. And depending on how good your website and your products and your offer is, they will choose to buy or to not buy. Organic traffic is when somebody basically find your website without you having to directly pay for advertising to get them on the website. The other option is when you do the exact opposite and you pay for advertising to get them on the website. It's really, really simple. With regards to organic, the idea here and what we are trying to do, and this is crucial. You are trying to create content that people naturally want to watch. You are not trying to create advertisements. You are trying to create content that people actually enjoy watching either for educational purposes or for entertainment purposes. Those are the main two categories that content falls into. So you kind of need to choose one or the other or have some type of other theme to it. But those are the two buckets I would focus on. And you need to create content that people want to watch for one of those two purposes. And then you need to try to integrate your brand or your product into that content. It is not the other way around. The content is not about your brand and your product. The content is about something that somebody is actually going to want to watch and then integrating your brand and content into that piece of content. By integrating your brand into that content, hopefully, it peaks their interest or they get curious about it or they want to buy XYZ product, you then need to have an easy way for them to get to your website, usually through a link in the bio or laying out the website in the comment section or putting a call to action in there, whatever it might be you need to find a way to make them enjoy that content, integrate the brand into that content in a positive way, and then give them a way to purchase your product at the end of it if they are interested. The best example of this, the absolute best company that is doing this right now is Red Bull on YouTube. They're paying extreme athletes to perform crazy stunts and do just wild outlandish things. The last one that I watched was plane was coming down and a skydiver came under the plane, held onto the plane as it entered a canyon, and then the plane brought him back up, and he skydived again. It was the wildest video that I've ever seen. And if you watch that video, you will notice, obviously there's red bull branding on the helicopter, so it kind of comes up here and there. But there's, like, one shot, maybe two shots of guys actually drinking red. 99% of the video is not about Red Bull. It is about the actual stunt because it's crazy and people actually want to watch it, so they're going to watch it all the way till the end. And they very, very seamlessly and smoothly integrate the Red Bull brand and the Red Bull product into the video that people naturally want to watch. That's the idea here. If you have any questions about that or you're curious about it, just go to the Red Bull YouTube page and watch one of their crazy stunts, and you will see exactly what I'm talking about. That is the gold standard for organic content at the moment. Now, let's just take a quick mini. I'm getting passionate here. Wow. Let's talk about paid content. Paid content is where you still have to create content because you need something to advertise to people. You either need a commercial or you need good product photos, or you need a little skit, or you need a short form video. Whatever it might be, you still have to create content. So that's something to really, really think about here. In these scenarios there, the content can can more obviously promote the product. Obviously, if you run a 32nd advertisement, you need to get the product promoted in that advertisement. And so the structure of a paid advertisement can be different if you're just doing paid advertisements, like a Super Bowl commercial or whatever it might be. The idea here is that you're paying dollars to put the most high converting piece of content in front of somebody that you possibly can. That's the general premise here, and that's the idea. And you are only going to get views that you paid for. That is something to really consider here. And it's a big factor here. And so you might be asking, there's huge advantages here, though. I should say that is if you have a massive budget, you can control this. You can get this out to 1 million people right away. You can promote it on different platforms. You have a lot of control if you have money when it comes to paid advertisements. That's why some companies launch on big days with massive commercials. It's because they have the funding to do it and they know that they can get that instant traction. So there is a huge advantage to paid advertisements, especially if you have the money to however, it kind of depends, like, which one is better is what you're probably thinking. Should I focus on organic? Should I focus on paid? The answer for 90% of people is going to be very, very simple. And this is the golden goose. This is the golden nugget. If you're going to take something out of the course, it's this right here. The answer is that which one is better, neither of them are better. What you need to do is create organic content that people actually want to watch and then advertise the content that brings in sales. So if you create a piece of content every day or every week or every three days, whatever it might be piece of content where you see a spike in sales after you post it or as views come in proportionally, that is the piece of content that you should advertise. And I am telling you right now that out of everything I have tried and everything out there, this is the best way to do it. If something does well organically, it is going to do well in a paid environment unless you are doing something wrong. And so this is the golden goose. This is the best strategy. It is consistently create organic content because that is going to lead to organic traffic and organic leads, and that is going to build up over time, but it is also going to allow you to filter through good advertisements and bad advertisements completely for free, and it's going to allow you to optimize your advertising campaigns for the content that is actually converting on sales before you have to spend the hundreds and thousands of dollars to figure out which advertisement works. So that is the strategy here. That is the idea. And just to show you that this works, we're going to use the website that I just walked you through. The brand is called Pack out Accessories. All I have done is create short form content Uh, really, really simple. All the videos are under 60 seconds. I film everything from my phone. None of them are high production quality. I film and post every video in less than 15 minutes. I am editing it in the Tik Tok app. Let me You can go find the social media channels if you want to hunt for it. The content and the production value is extremely low. But let me show you some of the results. I am posting these videos to Tik Tok, Instagram, YouTube, and I believe that they are going to Facebook, but I'm struggling with Facebook a little bit right now. That's another story we'll talk about later. The results, let me just show you the results. Sales so far since I started about two to 2.5 months ago, $6,400 USD. Website views, 12,299. My conversion rate between views and sales is extremely low, and I'm working on improving that in this store right now. But I drove over 12,000 website views, and just to show you this, we will refresh the page right now, and we'll go last 365 days, 12,299 views and $6,408 in sales. And so that is what we have generated just from organic content, and it has now reached over 1.7 million people. And that numbers actually just from Tik Tok. It doesn't include YouTube or Instagram. And so the results just from doing what I just told you is absolutely insane. And here is the step by step strategy. Number one, create a social media page for Instagram, Tik Tok, YouTube and Facebook if you can. Number two, put your website link in the bio or in the comment to every video and every post that you make. Just make sure that on whatever platform you are on, there is a way for people to purchase your products and get to your website. That is key. It doesn't matter how you do it. It doesn't matter what your strategy is. If somebody watches your video and they like what they see, they need a way to get to your website. That's the only thing that I'm saying in that. Number three, put your logo as the profile image. It doesn't matter what it is. You need to brand it. You need to put your nice logo in the profile image so that people know that they're dealing with a company and what company and brand they are dealing with. Number four, this is the hard part. This is where everybody falls off a cliff. Nobody actually does it because it's like, it's hard and it's difficult in the beginning because it doesn't pay off, and then all of a sudden it starts to make sense, and it's the best moneymaker you'll ever do, but you need to make a piece of content every single day. And if you can make more than piece of content, it is going to multiply your results. I absolutely guarantee it. The more content you can make, it's going to be a direct correlation with how successful you are. And so, me, personally, my goal when I sit down and make content, and I have three different brands that I'm building right now is to make four pieces of content per day. So on a good production day where I am actually oh, sorry, I didn't show you I don't know if you can see this, but 1.7 million views. I have the page open. I don't know if you're gonna be able to see this. 1.7 million views on TikTok. I was supposed to show you that. Um But my goal when I sit down, I have three brands. I try to make four pieces of content per day. That is 12 short form videos that I am making, and most of the time, I can do it in under an hour and a half. So let me just tell you, for an hour and a half of work, it is the best ROI that I can possibly Well, one of the best ways to earn money for me with regards to ROI on my time, it is something that scales up exponentially, especially as you build a following and as you get better at it. So what you need to do if you're just starting out and you're doing this for the first time, you need to literally block off an hour per day in your calendar to make content. That's it. That's the best strategy. That is the best thing that you could do for yourself is to spend 1 hour per day every single day making content. For me, what I do is I film and I edit in the Tik Tok app, so I post everything to TikTok, and then I use a software called repurpose dot IO to send that content to all other platforms. I'm going to put a link to repurpose dot IO in the description to this video and basically kind of floating above in the course resources section here. You need to click on that link. You need to sign up for repurpose dot IO. It does have a monthly subscription, but what it's going to do is it's going to allow you to post onto one platform, whether it's TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, doesn't matter. And then it's going to take that piece of content, remove the watermark, and automatically post it to all of the other formats and all of the other platforms that are going to view that content. So Instagram, YouTube, Tik Tok, reels, even threads, I think it works with. And so what you need to do is use that software to make your piece of content once and post it, and then automate it to all of the other platforms. To show you what I mean here, I will pull up my account and you'll be blown away. But when I make a piece of content, I make it on my TikTok account, and then it goes to all of the other platforms automatically. And I have like 30 or 40 of those automates. So these are all the automations that I have. Every time I post on TikTok, it goes to these platforms, depending on the channel. I also include LinkedIn. I include threads. I include Twitter, all of these different platforms. And so it is amazing because you can connect all of your different social media platforms and then automate it to go to the different platforms. The other advantage here is it will connect to Google Drive, and every time I post on TikTok, it downloads and saves that video to Google Drive so that I have a backup. And so it is an amazing resource. It's well worth it, and you should use it to save you time from having to post on other platforms, because what's crazy is that I could have a video that does 1,000 views on TikTok. It could do 10,000 on YouTube and it could do 100,000 on Instagram. And I have nobody has any idea what the key is and what's going to do well on what platform. So, the more content you can make and the more platforms that you can put it out on, the faster and quicker you will be able to grow your following and your sales online. That is the key to traffic. I have driven that 13,000 whatever 13,000 here. 12,299 website views just from making some short form content over the last two months. So think about that in your mind. Those are the results that you can get. I use repurpose dot IO to take it from one platform and send it to all the others as well as save it to Google Drive so that I have a backup. And then the key there is to then analyze your videos. Which ones got the most views, and then which ones drove the most new followers? When did the sales go up compared to when you posted what videos? Can you correlate sales to specific videos? Can you analyze your data to figure out what is working and then literally just do more of? Just make more videos around that theme or in that style or with that type of hook. Don't copy that video, but just put spins and alterations and different takes and different scenarios on that same style of video. And if you can continue to grow that and continue to see success, that is going to be the fastest way to start to bring in sales. And then the key after that is to figure out exactly which videos are bringing in the sales and then advertise those videos. The advantage here is that you use the organic traffic to filter through the videos that are good or bad at bringing in sales. And once you find one that work pump some money into that into a couple of different areas, and that is going to be the best way for you to bring in sales, build an audience, and build this business on a budget. If you have lots of money to spend on this, you can skip a couple steps maybe with the advertisements, and you can experiment a little bit more. But if you are trying to do this in your basement or with your first printer or you're young and you don't have a ton you don't have $5,000 to spend on advertising, I swear to God, this is going to be the absolute best way for you to see success early on. And I've literally just proven it. You can go look at my social medias. You can see the views that I'm bringing in. This is the brand. These are the sales. Like, you can see I've done $6,000 in sales just by making a video a day, and it's only going up. I think I've done $3,000 in the last week. And so it's a snowball that's going to build up. And then once you get it going with one brand, you can launch a second brand and a third brand and a fourth brand, and you can just rinse and repeat all the way to the moon. That's the goal. So that's it for this video. I hope this one was helpful. This is a topic I'm pretty passionate about. If I missed anything or you have questions about anything, leave a comment down below, and I'll try and get back to you as soon as I can. Thanks so much, and we'll see you in the next one. 11. Increasing conversion rate: All right, everybody, welcome back to another video. In this one, we're going to be talking about how to increase your conversion rate on Shopify and make more money. Now, when I say conversion, right, what I'm referring to is, if 100 people visit your website, what percentage of those people actually purchase something? If it was two people purchasing something, you'd have a 2% conversion. In general, we're trying to aim for a 3% to 5% conversion rate. That would be extremely good. One to 3% would be considered decent and okay, below 1% would be considered not very good at all. And so that is sort of what we are trying to aim for in this video, and right now, I'm going to walk you through a couple of ways that we can kind of get there. So, number one, the first thing that I would say, if you're going to launch products on Shopify and sell products through Shopify is you're going to want to try and get an app that is going to display reviews for you and sort of show some social proof. And so for me, at the bottom of all of my listings, you can see customer reviews. This is from an app that I will show you in 1 minute. I'll pull it up right in Shopify so you can see it. But it shows the reviews. These are authentic reviews. You can see that they're actually verified by people that purchased it. And I don't actually have a lot of control over these reviews. Not that the customers really know that, but at least it shows a little bit of social proof. So that's number one. Make sure you have reviews on your product list. Now, just to jump to this point really quick here and make sure that we go for it, I want to find the app that I am using right now. It's called judge dot me Reviews. So if you want to search it up in the app store, that is the one that I am specifically using. The next thing that you're really going to want when you are trying to increase the percentage of people that actually purchase your product is you're going to want some product videos. Now, for me, I use a really simple video at the bottom of each product that basically shows how the product works. It inserts into a liner. It stores all your bits, I stores all your tools, and it helps you to organize all the tools and accessories or the batteries, whatever you might be using. Very, very simple to explain. And so I use a very, very simple video. Depending on your product and your brand and your target audience, you're probably going to want to customize this into a video that fits that demographic and fits that marketplace. For me, something nice, simple, instructional really fits the market that I am going after. And so you want to try and make sure that you have a video on all of your listings, if possible. It doesn't have to be complicated. This was filmed on an iPhone, just holding it vertically with a stand, and then I'm just kind of maneuvering the products there and editing it afterwards. And so it doesn't have to be high end. You just want to make sure that it sort of matches the aesthetic and the appeal and the market that you're going after. Next thing that you might want to consider here is bundling your products. And so if you can sell two liners and offer a small discount, that's better than selling one liner because what it's going to allow you to do is ship two products for the price of one shipping, which is really, really great. It's going to increase your overall profit. You might make slightly less comparatively on the second product because you're offering a discount. It's going to make up for it because you wouldn't have got that sale anyways. And so it is almost always worth it to bundle your products together. For me, I have no idea what tools people have. And so I say, if you buy any two of my liners, you get a 5% discount. If you buy three of them, you get a 10% discount. And what it does is it increases my average order value, and it increases the overall profit that I'm generating on every customer that I'm bringing into the website. Ideally, I want to maintain a certain margin amount. But if I can give them an additional product at a slightly lower margin and still get the sale, it's well worth it because it's just adding gross profit to every order that ships out the door. And that's what you're really trying to maximize when you're running an ecommerce store. So bundling your products together, also a great option here. I'll find out what app I am using for this. It is called Bundler, it looks like is the app that I am using right now. Apps, yeah, Bundler so definitely check that out if you're interested in trying it out. Another one is email sign up. So if you go to settings, and then we look at checkout, where is it right here, it's going to ask you if you want your customers to sign up for the email. I think it's right here. Marketing options. You can choose to display a pre selected box. You want people to sign up for your email list as much as possible. If you have them on your email list, it means you have their contact in can send them alerts. You can send them promotions. You can send them new product launches. It is well, well worth it. Every time I launch a new product on my website, I send out an email, and most of those emails are bringing in some revenue. It's not massive right now, but it is working. I'll see if I can show it to you right now. So let's go to marketing. Okay, so my last campaign, I just sent it out on May 17. So a couple days ago after I'm filming this video, six new products have been launched, 51% open rate, 10% of people clicked, and it brought in $200 in sales instantly. Not a massive amount of sales. It's not going to change the world, but that number is going to grow consistently as I bring in more sales as I build up that email list. And so it is well, well worth it to try and do whatever you can to convince people to sign up for your email list. Next one here is a return policy. If you click on any of my products, you will see that I have a very clear return policy, and it makes it very obvious, especially when people aren't buying on Amazon or Walmart. They want to know what the return policy looks like and how hard it's going to be. So if you can be upfront with that, it eliminates some of their nerves, and it eliminates some of their hesitation towards purchasing. Next one is the frequently asked questions. I think this one helps a lot more than people give it credit for. But basically keep track of what questions you get asked the most as your business, whether it's shipping, whether it's product related, whether it's customs related, whether it's tariff related, whether it's return related, whatever it might be, figure out what gets asked the most and put it into a frequently asked questions because it will reduce your contact rate of people reaching out to you and it will lower your labor costs. Will also give people more confidence in your website because they'll be able to find the answers that they want right away. So it really, really matters. Then last one is shipping updates. If you connect your product through Slant or through any of these other providers, it will be automated. But if you're sending out orders yourself, you need to find a way to make sure that your customer gets a notification that thanks them for the order, gets a notification that the shipping the shipment has started and what the tracking number is, and then gets another notification that the product has been delivered. Need to automate all of that so that you never have to do anything. And if you can do all of that, I guarantee you your conversion rate on your website will increase by at least half a percent, if not 1%. It's well worth it. And in the long run, it's probably the best return on your time that you will be able to get, especially if you can do it early. So I hope this video helped. We'll see you in the next one. Thank you so much. 12. Running the Store: All right, everybody, welcome back to another video. In this one, we're going to talk about what it actually takes to run the store. What are the daily and monthly routines that you want to go through, and what are the key metrics and things that you want to be evaluating when analyzing the performance of your store. And so let's dive right into it. Let's jump right into it. This is what I do on a daily basis to run my store. Number one, I check on the customer service email. That is where you're going to get new inquiries. That's where you're going to get questions about your products. That's where people are going to email you to figure out what's going on with their order, if they have any issues. So that is the first place that you want to check. You want to stay on top of that, provide the best customer service that you can and make sure that you are getting back to people because if they know that you're responsive, you solve their issue and you provide what you say you're going to provide, those are the people that are most likely to order from you again. And so it really matters. You need to stay on top of this, and this is genuinely a daily task. Next thing, you need to check on your orders. Right now, my Shop If I store is connected to a three D print farm in the US, so all I need to do is make sure that the connections are working, that the products are matched correctly, that any new products have a match in the software, and that orders are getting out on time. If that looks good, then I got nothing to do. And most of the time once you get it set up, once you get it automated, you shouldn't have a whole lot here to do because everything should be automated and it should work for you without you having to do much, you're just there to check on the system. The next thing you need to do in your daily routine here is try and improve the website, try and figure out what's working, what's not working. Run some AB tests, try out different photos, try out different texts, find different ways to optimize and improve your website. This is something that you should be trying on a daily basis, and you should be evaluating the data from the day before. This can be a huge, huge booster. If you can do this on a consistent and ongoing basis, it will help you to continuously improve the conversion rate of your website. Next thing is marketing and sales. This is an important part of the business. If you are starting to build an email list of people that have bought from your store or have signed up from your email list, you need to stay in touch with them. You need to stay top of mine. You need to consistently be in their inbox. You need to be writing emails, you need to provide them with content that they're going to enjoy reading or that they're going to get value from, and that's going to make them want to purchase your products at some point in the future. That is the goal behind the emails. You don't want to make it a completely sales email. You want to provide some value. You want to provide some content. You want to give them a reason to actually open it. Do want to focus on sales, though, is when you are filming content. Here you want to be making content for your social media, for your YouTube channel, for your product pages, for your website. Your job is to create content for your brand. That is how you get the word out there. That is how you generate advertisements. That's how you create all of the sales that are going to be coming in for your business. They're going to require photos. They're going to require videos. And so getting good at filming and creating content is something that you need to be doing on a regular basis. I am filming videos of my products on an almost daily basis that I'm using for social media that I am using for my product pages that I am using to advertise with. And it is a crucial part of the business, and it is almost a daily routine. And then on top of that, you need to be creating and working on and launching new products. Don't stay static. Always make sure you have something in the pipeline that you're working on actively and that you can put a little bit of time into every single day. That is what your daily routine should look like. And if you don't want to do it yourself, the good news is that you can outsource every disparate aspect of this. You can have somebody write your emails. You can have somebody manage your customer service. You can pay somebody to check on your orders. You can basically outsource every different aspect of this, but what you should understand is how to do it yourself first. You need to be able to train somebody, you need to be able to make sure that they're doing the job. And so what I would recommend with is start doing this yourself. Once you make enough money or you get busy enough, then you can outsource each individual task to somebody that specializes in it or is really good at it. That's how I think about managing the day to day business of my website. Now, when it comes to the monthly routine, this is a little bit different. A lot of the focus here is more so on analyzing the performance and the data and making big decisions. When we're in the daily routine here, we're just there to execute. We're there to get through the checklist. We're there to make the content. We are there to get boots on the ground. We're not thinking a whole lot about high level strategy. Then at the end of each month at the beginning of next month, you need to sit down. You need to analyze the data. You need to calculate your revenue and expenses, make sure that you're actually making money and figure out how much money you're making and what your gross profit is. Ideally, as both a number and a percentage, you want to know if you bring in $100, at least 40% of it is going to your gross profit, 15% of it is going to your net profit, and you're making $1.50 on every $10 that you sell. Those are the kind of numbers that you want to be aware of, and ideally you want those numbers to be going in the right direction. Also want to try and identify sales trends. What are your best selling products? What has grown in sales the most since the last time you analyzed the data? What has fallen in sales the most since you last analyzed the data? And what is your worst product that you might want to consider dropping? That is the type of data that you need to be analyzing every single month. Then, based on your sales, based on the data, based on the trends that you're seeing, you should then adjust your marketing and your ad spent. If you notice that one category of products is selling way better than the other, you want to spend more money making videos about those products, or you want to put more into the ad spend there, or you want to try and adjust your strategy to capitalize most and generate the most profit. And so you want to adjust where you are spending, your marketing and your advertising dollars. Next thing is that you need to remove or adjust things that are not working. So look for everything that is performing poorly and badly and ask yourself, do I need to get rid of this or what can I do to make it perform better? Do I need to retake the photos? Do I need to change the listing? Do I need to change the title? Do I need to add a product video? Do I need to make better production videos about this? Why is it not selling? What's going on here? Is the shipping cost way too high? Is the price way too high? What is wrong here? Or is it just not worth it? Is it just not worth putting in the effort to try and fix it? Because the product is dead. There's too much competition. There's something wrong with it. You can't produce it at a good enough price. Whatever it might be, you need to analyze it. It's either fix it or cut it. It's one of the two. If you're gonna fix it, it's going to require resources. And if you cut it, you're going to lose the sales that it was bringing in. But you need to make one of those decisions on your bottom products every single month. Next one here is to work on your product roadmap and your future products. This is the high level strategy area where you want to think about, what is the next product that I'm going to be launching? Why am I launching that? What data do I have to support that decision? Is this the best use of my resources? How much money is it going to cost me to launch that? Can the company afford to pay to launch that? Or is there some low hanging fruit that we should be picking off first? Going to bring in some quick revenue and give us a better financial position. Those are the things that you want to think about here, and this is the time to do it when you have an idea of what your cash balance is at the end of the month, you know, how much you made or lost last month, you know what the trends are looking like? Are the numbers going up? Are they going down? Where do you need to be investing your money? This is the time you sit down and you think about these decisions. You don't do it in the middle of the month when you're behind on launching new products and you haven't made videos in a few days and you haven't sent an email to your customer list, that is not the time to think about strategy. That is the time to execute and just get the job done and get back to your daily routine. And then at the end of the month or at the beginning of the next month, you analyze the performance. You see what worked, what didn't you put together a new plan for the next month with a roadmap for your company that's usually at least three months long with regards to new products, new developments, new projects, and where you're spending your resources. Are the things that you want to think about, but you need to separate them. You need to be operating your business or growing your business, and then you need to be strategizing about your business. And the strategy session probably needs to happen once per month when you're looking at all the data. It shouldn't happen at the other times throughout the month. It can come up in casual conversation, but you should save the in depth conversations for that meeting right there. That is super important. Now lastly, when it comes to running your Shopify website and running your business to Shopify, there are basically three main goals or metrics that you want to think about, and those three goals, if they're going in the right direction, that's what's going to lead to profitability. Number one here is you want to increase your website traffic. This is basically the number of people that land on your website. This is done. Through marketing and advertising, primarily through social media or whatever method you find works best. The idea is to increase this number as much as possible, but you want it to be qualified. So if somebody lands on your website, you want it to be because they like something about your product. They saw an advertisement, they're interested in buying. If you're sending people to the website that don't understand why they're there or are being tricked into going there or might have no interest in buying, that is not good. That is not going to help you and that's not going to be good for your metrics. What you're looking for is to increase the number of people that visit your website that have a chance of buying your product. That is metric number one. Basically, you're trying to get more views than you'd got last month on your landing page or on your website. Number two, here is you want to increase your conversion rate. We've talked about this before. If 100 people go to your website, what percentage of those people end up purchasing anything on your website? If it's two, then you have a 2% conversion rate. If you get five people out of 100, that's a 5% conversion rate. Ideally, we're aiming for something between 3% and 5%. Anything 1-2 is okay but not great. Anything below one is bad. If you can get to 3% to 5%, I would say that's good. And if you can get above 5%, I would say that's amazing, to be honest with then once you understand what your conversion rate is, your goal is to make sure that everybody that purchases something on your website purchases two or three or four things or increases their basket in some way. You want to get more sales, and then you want the dollar value of every sale to increase as much as possible. If you are on a subscription service or you're selling something a subscription, you want the lifetime value of that customer to be as large as possible or how long they are subscribed to and how much money that single customer is worth. The idea here is that you can measure the first metric and the views to your website second metric as a percentage, and the third metric is basically the average order size of every order that goes through your website. If you can improve these individual metrics, that is how you increase your profit as a business. Profit as a business is a result of getting better at these three things. So if you're trying to make more money, this is what you focus on. You don't focus on making more money, you focus on things that will lead to making more money. That is the goal here. That's what I'm trying to get across for you, and that is how I run my business. So I hope this video helped, and we'll see you in the next one. 13. Product Photos 1: Alright, everybody, welcome back to another video. In this one, we are going to start talking about product photos. I'm going to walk you through everything that you need to know about product photos, and then I'm going to give you the real life full on tutorial and workflow of how I take product photos for all of my products. So let's jump into it. The first thing that you need to understand here is that we are not professional photographers. We are not going to learn how to be professional photographers, and I am not going to teach you how to be a professional photographer. What I am going to show you, though, is how to take product photos that are good enough to test your product. Then if the product works and the product is successful, I suggest that you use some of that money from the success and go get professional photography done. If you can improve the sales and improve the product and improve how much money you are making by getting professional photos done, it is well worth it. But professional photos versus good photos is 99% of the time not going to be what makes or breaks your product. And so getting products that are just good enough for a small amount of money and a small amount of time upfront and being able to test more products is usually going to give you a better result. So that is the mindset that we are going to take to this. You have the money to spend, though, and you are ready to spend it, and you're 100% confident and you want to go get professional photos done, by all means, go and do it. But for most people, this is usually going to be the best strategy that's going to give you the most efficient results for the lowest price. This is what I do, and so this is what I'm going to teach. In order to execute on this strategy, you are going to need three things. The first thing is a camera. The second thing is a light box, and the third thing is a software. And in this video, I'm going to show you exactly what I use. Right now, as I film this video, and the camera that I use for product photography is this Osmo three from DJI. It is super useful for videos. It's super useful for photography. It takes amazing quality shots that are good enough for what I need. I used to use this Cannon SL three, which took fantastic shots. But honestly, I'm not skilled enough to use it to its full capacity, and it's kind of bulky. It's kind of cumbersome, and it's really difficult to teach other people. And so I am using the Osmo three that I'm filming this video on right now, as well as for product photography because it does a good enough job for what I need and what my personal capabilities are because, again, we're not professional photographers, so there's no point in going out and getting a professional photography camera because it's just not worth it. And so I use the Osmo can use your cell phone? No. If you have an iPhone like 12 or better or even ten or better, you can probably use your cell phone. You can get away with it. It's not going to be the end of the world. It might not be quite as good, but it's going to be good enough. And that is the key. That's what we're going for here, because if the product is successful, then we can reinvest some of that money into getting better photos done. But we are trying to test we are trying to save up our money, to test as many products as possible so that when one works, we can really hit home with it because if we invest all of our money into one product where we invest a ton of resources into one product and it ends up not working, then we don't have a whole lot of runway to test a bunch more products. And so that's the mindset that we are going to approach it with the second thing that you're going to need is a light box. This is the exact one that I bought off Amazon. I will also put a link to it in the resources for this course. It's worked out really well for me. I would actually recommend it. Depending on the size of your product, what I would say is get as large of a light box as you possibly can. My products are let's just say 1 ft wide in their largest dimension. And so I got a light box that was 32 " wide in all dimensions. And I would say it's probably the perfect size for what I'm doing. So maybe use that ratio of a three to one ratio for your product dimensions. You should get a light box that's three times the size of the longest dimension. I would say that's a good rule of thumb. Next thing, once you have the light box is you're going to need a software in order to edit the photos. There are some free options out there. There are also some budget options out there. I will tell you, though, the industry standard and the best on the market is going to be Photoshop. It will cost you $30 per month, though. If you are sensitive to that price or you want something cheaper, lots of different options out there. I'm just not going to be able to show you the instructions and exactly how to use it, but there are going to be plenty of videos on YouTube and other resources that will be able to help. Now, the workflow here, when I say workflow, what I mean is here are the steps that we're going to go through in order to execute getting product photos done. Number one, we're going to print a super high quality version of the product. So we're designing our product or we're having it designed or whatever the system looks like, you need to print a very, very good model of that product. So print it in as high of a quality as you possibly can. Then you need to set up your light box and get any props or accessories that you might need. So with my products, they all need a tool. They all need some drill bits. They all need some type of accessories. And so I got to make sure that I have all of that ready to go before I'm going to sit down and take those photos. Once I have all of that ready to go, I got the light box set up, I'm going to take as many photos as I feel necessary. I'm going to take those photos from all the different useful angles. I'm going to set it up in three different ways and see which angle looks best. And I'm going to get creative with it. I'm going to take photos, and I'm going to imagine that I'm a pouct photographer taking photos for Apple. What would they want it to look like? That's the kind of mindset that I have in my head as I'm going through that process, and then I'm going to sit down at my computer. I'm going to import those photos. I'm going to edit usually 7-10 of them depending on what the product is and how they look, and then I'm going to add those products to my listing. That entire process can be done, believe it or not, in less than one to 2 hours. It shouldn't take a whole lot of time, especially if you're already set up and you have everything prepared and ready to go ahead of time. Alright, now, when you're going through the process of taking photos, here are the different types of photos that you're going to want to focus on and remember to take. The first one is going to be your main image. If you have a certain theme on your website or a certain angle that you take all of your main product photos from or a certain background or a certain lighting, you're going to want to keep that consistent across your website. You're also going to want to think about some photos that show the entire product altogether. What are they actually getting? What does it look like shipped? What does it look like in the box? Then what does it look like unpacked? You may want to consider those things depending on what you're selling. Next one is detail shots. You want to kind of get in there and take a good close up photo of the details and the effort and the actual features that your product has. Then you want to take photos of your product in scene or in use. So with me, I put the tools into the product. I show how it stores everything. I show a couple of photos on a on a worksite or when they're in use or when you're opening up the case to change a tire, whatever it might be, try and get creative and show how your product is actually used by an end consumer so that they can see themselves actually using the product and they can see how it's supposed to be used. And then the last one here is usually a photo that points out some of the features or talks about some of the specs associated with your product. And so if it only works for a certain model or if it has a certain flavor or a certain scent or whatever it is, make sure that you kind of highlight the specs and features of what your product actually does. Those are the big things that you're going to want to focus about and the way that you may want to structure your photos as somebody that goes through your listing. And so, just to show you what mine looks like, we can click on any of my products here. You can see that the main page or the main photo is almost identical for all of them. It's basically a straight on shot shows you the product from the top down. And then when you click on it, the second photo is usually going to be a detailed shot. If it doesn't show you a detail shot, it's because I haven't updated those photos in a little while. But if you look at all four of these, it's like, here's an overview top shot of the product, and then here's a detailed shot of what it actually looks like up close. And so that's how it structured mine. And then at the bottom of each of the product pages, you should also see a video. And so here's a video of what the product actually looks you open it up, when you set it up, and when you put your tools inside of it. And so somebody can actually understand what they have to do once they get the product and then how they can use it once they're actually ready to take it to the job site or to take it into use. And so that is how I structure my photos, and all of the specs and the information is held within the listing on the right hand side. Then I suggest a couple other products as well. And so when it comes to product photos, you want to try and make them as appealing, as attractive, as enticing as you possibly can, and you want to structure it in a way that is going to lead the customer through a journey that says, Okay, that's eye catching. I want to check it out. I want to learn more about it. Okay, that's how it works. Those are the features. Those are the benefits. And this is everything else that I need to know about the product, read the description, make a decision in their head, and click that B button. That's what we're trying to go for. And in the next video now, I'm going to show you the process of what that workflow actually looks like. 14. Product Photos 2: Alright, everybody, welcome back to another video. As you can see, we're in a little bit different setting right now. I'm currently in the utility room at my house, and that is because this is where I have set up the light box. And so, right now, I'm going to show you exactly what the process looks like. Let's jump in. Okay, so based on the workflow that we talked about in the last video, the first thing we need to do is print off a really high quality version of our product. Here, you can see I've printed things off in like a 0.8 or 0.1 millimeter layer height. So it came out pretty good. I am happy with it. This is a high quality kind of photo ready product for me. And then as I zoom out here, you can see the light box. So this is what I bought off Amazon. It's 32 " in all dimensions. It's got a little controller on here that I've just kind of placed on top. And when you turn this on, the light box lights up. It's got three LEDs in the roof there. It's got a white background, but it has a bunch of other colors that you can use. And then it reflects the light and it keeps all of it inside so that you have almost perfect lighting for any product that you want to take a photo of. So now we've got step one done. We've printed our high quality version. We've got step two done. We've got a light box set up, and we've got it turned on. I keep it up and open like this because I'm always taking product photos, but you can shut it down. You can wrap it up. You can do whatever you need if you're not using it. Next step is going to be to take photos. Now, the key here is to try and get angles that are attractive for the product that you're selling. Sometimes that's straight on. Sometimes that's from the top, sometimes that's from the side. You're really gonna have to figure that out for yourself. I recommend experimenting with it the first time. And then, honestly, you'll get really good at it after two or three times. But the goal here is take as many photos as you want. Take as many photos as you possibly can and then go through them on your computer and try and find the best ones. And so I'm filming right now on the camera that I usually use to take photos, the Osmo three. But the idea here is that I'm just going to stand here. I'm going to take photos from the top from the side here, from down low, from the angles. I'm going to take a photo from every different w way that I think might look good for a product photo. And then I'm going to save them. I'm going to go to my computer and I'm going to edit them there. That is the idea. That is the goal here, and you want to put as much effort as you possibly can into this while still being efficient. We don't want to spend thousands of dollars on this, but it's probably worth it to spend 20, 40, $50 on some accessories, on some props on whatever is going to help your product look really good and stand out from the competition. Okay, so now that you've got your product photos taken, it's time to start editing them. I'm going to show you how I do it in Photoshop, but again, you can use any software you want. So going to open Photoshop, you're going to go to a new file, and you're going to try and open image in our scenario. And for Shopify, I recommend doing 2000 pixels by 2000 pixels on a white background. That is the default settings that you're going to want to use. I don't think it's going to show up on the screen right now, but that should be enough information to get you started and get you to a page that looks like this. Once you're on this page, you then need to import the photos from your desktop or from the SD card on the camera, whatever it might be. There's several different ways to do this. Number one, probably the easiest way is open up the basically folder that is keeping those photos on your computer and just drag them, drop them into Photoshop right now. The other option that you can do this is you can go to File in the top left corner and then click on Place Embedded and then choose them from your computer. So several different ways to do this, lots of different options here. All you're trying to do is just get the photo into Photoshop at this. So for me, I use the file place embedded, and then I just selected the image from my computer. This is what came up here, and the first thing that we're going to do is we're just going to click on the checkmark. And so, as you can see, we have a couple of different issues that we need to address here. Number one, we have a background here, but we need to remove that background because obviously it's not a perfect white. It is not the perfect Christine white that we want. And so we want to get rid of that so that it basically matches this background here. We also need to resize it. We also may want to brighten it and make it a little bit more attractive to look at. So those are the things that go through my mind now that we have the photo in here. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to remove the background. Now, to do this, there's a couple of different ways. The fastest and easiest way to do this, depending on your product is to click the removed background button. The problem with that is that it's probably not going to remove this middle section for us. And so, well, click on it, and I'll show you what it looks like. You click on Remove Background. And basically, if you have one solid product like this that doesn't have any holes in it or anything like that, this is probably going to work really well. But as you can see, it has this hole in the middle, so it doesn't really work for us. So the other way to do this is to click on this button on the left hand side here. It's called the Quick Selection Tool. And then all you're going to do is basically just kind of hover over the product itself. For me, it's this black area. And we're going to click on this button right here that basically says, create mask from selection. It's going to go like that, and basically, it's going to remove the background for us. That's probably the most common and the easiest way to do it if you have any kind of intricacies within your part because then you can just select the part that you want to keep. So now we need to go back to the product here and make sure that we're actually clicked on it. These are different layers to your image, and so it allows you to edit certain aspects of it without the other. But for us, all we're really trying to do is make the photo look good and remove the background so we don't really need to get that complicated, so I'm not going to dive into it in this one. Next thing, after you have done the Quick Selection tool, we're going to go back up to the move tool here and we're going to resize this. We're going to make sure that it's the proper size for our listing. We want to make sure let's just say this was the main image that we want to use. We're going to make sure that it goes almost to all of the boundaries and that it matches the theme, and it matches the background and it matches the angle and the colors of the other main images that we are using on our website. And so this looks pretty good. It seems like it's in the right place. Once we have it in the right place, we need to click on this basically checkmark button that is going to commit those changes, and now it is ready to next thing that I want to change here is I want to brighten it up. As you can see, some of these shadows are pretty strong here, and it kind of hides some of the details that I actually want to point out in the product. So, again, we're just going to click on the actual image itself here on the right hand side under the layers tab, and then we're going to click on image. We're going to go to adjustments. We're going to go to brightness and contrast. And I don't think you can see it because of my screen recorder, but there's basically a scroll bar that's going to allow me to lighten up this image and change some of the actual settings. And you can change all of the different settings just by going to image adjustments, and then you can change the exposure. You can change the vibrant. You can really make the image look however you want. And so what I would recommend is figure out a couple of settings that work well for your main image and then try and apply those settings to the other products as closely as possible. You're going to have variations there. You'll need to modify them a little bit, but that's what I would recommend. And now have a product where the lighting looks good, the color looks good. Everything looks good with it. It's the right proportion for the image. The image itself is in the right dimensions. We've removed the background, and we are ready to go. Now, you need to save the product. What I would recommend is saving it as a Photoshop file so that you can come back and edit all of these settings and then save it again as a JPEG file that you can use on your website. That way, if you ever need to change the lighting or change the size of the image or change the dimensions or change anything it's very, very easy to do, and you have full control over it. And you also have a good copy of it for your website that isn't going to take up a whole lot of storage space. And so I recommend saving it as a JPEG and saving it as a photoshop file. If you just go Control S on a Windows computer, it will do that for you. And then if you go Windows, or control Alt S, it will save it. I will give you the ability to save it as a JPEG. So Control S to save as Photoshop, Control Alt S to save as a JPEG. That's what I would recommend, and that's how I would basically go through the workflow. And then I would take that JPEG photo, and I would use that photo and upload it to my listing on Shopify or on whatever platform I'm selling on. And so that is the workflow, that is the process. And honestly, taking photos, if you're set up and you're ready to go, taking photos should take you somewhere 5-20 minutes depending on what the product is and how difficult it is and setup and accessories. But that process should not take long. And then editing the photos should take way less than 5 minutes per photo. It should only take 5 minutes or more if you have to blur out some logos or really make some edits here. But this process should not take long and it should not cost you a lot of money, which is why it's going to allow you to launch several products instead of just one, and it's going to be the most efficient way for you to get good photos, not amazing photos, but good enough photos to test the product and to build some profit to then go get amazing photos. So that's the goal here. That's what we're working towards, and I hope this 15. Conclusion: Alright, everybody. Welcome back to the last video. First thing I want to do is just say thank you. I really appreciate it watching through these videos, it means the world to me, and I hope that I've been able to provide some value. Throughout this course, my goal is to help you create your first product, launch your first website, and bring in your first sales. That may or may not have happened, but hopefully I have given you the foundation to bring in that first sale, to bring in that second sale, and then to start scaling up your business. That is the goal here, and I hope that I have provided some value on that journey. You're interested in following along with what I am doing after this course, definitely check out my content on social media. You'll either find me under my personal brand, Zach Hartley or under my three D printing brand, Hartley Printing. I have also launched and developed a software to help three D print firms optimize and run their print firms more efficiently. So definitely check that out at princ.ca if you are interested in anything like that. Also have a ton of other courses on Skillshare dedicated to a variety of topics, all focused on money, so I highly recommend checking them out. It's going to be a huge benefit to you, no matter where you are in life and what you are doing in your business. I highly recommend it. Just to click away, at least give them a shot. Next one here is, please submit a class project. It means the world to me. Means that people are actually participating and getting some value and building some with what I am teaching. And so I would sincerely appreciate it. If you could even just share your website, that'd be amazing because more than likely I'm going to go to it and I'm going to try and buy something. I'm going to be a customer. I want to support you, as well. So if you can submit a class project, I'm going to try and buy your project or buy your product from your website. If you're willing to share it, I would sincerely appreciate it. Then the last thing here is if you're interested in a one on one call after this course, definitely check it out. You should be able to book it through my profile on Skillshare. There is a fee associated with that, but if you are looking for that personalized coaching, little bit of mentorship here or you have some questions that just didn't get answered in the course, that is where you can get those questions answered. Definitely check it out there. And thank you so much. I sincerely appreciate it, and I hope this course helped a lot, and I hope to see you soon. Bye for now.